and at first I thought it was about McCain/Palin vs. Obama/Biden.  Then I remembered LHC.  Yay, we’re all still here!

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Tepring’s sister, Sharon, picked us up and we headed to DC for the rehearsal of John Williams and The President’s Own Marine Band. We were able to get in because Sharon’s husband works for the band.

The next three hours were an amazing preview of the concert we’ll go to Sunday evening. The traditionally orchestral pieces have been re-orchestrated for band, and Mr. Williams was often surprised how well it worked. Part of that is that this is perhaps the best band anywhere, though!

During the concert, we had full scores to follow, which made the rehearsal more interesting for the four of us huddled around the music stand.

Afterward, we waited while the band staff met Mr. Williams, and Ted was able to get a couple of autographs. Amazing day so far!

We had sushi at Sharon and Ted’s favorite place in Annapolis and got to bed early. 3:30am was a long time ago!

1. App Store.  The new Apple App Store provides hundreds of third-party applications for the iPhone. These increase the value of the device, and let you customize it to suit your needs.  There’s no reason most iPhone users need LightSaber (a free addon that makes light saber sounds when you swing the phone around), but it’s mission-critical for a big nerd like me.
2. GPS.  The new iPhone GPS works flawlessly.  I have another GPS that’s useful, but it’s a dedicated device.  The iPhone can tag your photos with lat/long information about where the pic was taken.  That kind of integration is sweet.  The map also works well.  We were headed to a friend’s house for the first time, so I popped out the phone, it found where I was, and I asked how to get to my friend’s house.  It tracked our progress, and I could see clearly what to do next.  There’s even a “Where’d I park?” application that you can use to tag the location of your car before consuming expensive beer at a ball game.  Excellent, and included with a device I already have.
3. Integration.  I was able to easily install iTunes on my WinXP laptop and synch my Outlook contacts & calendar in to the phone.  Doing this with Windows Mobile and Palm has been much harder with past devices.  I think I’ll now move from iPhone to Google contacts & calendar, but haven’t really decided yet.  (One thing that annoyed me is that my Windows 2000 machine isn’t supported by iTunes, but I’m seeing more and more of that, so it didn’t frustrate me all that much.)
4. Web Browser.  This thing runs Safari, a full-featured web browser.  It does fancy CSS and JavaScript things my Windows Mobile phone balked at.  It also has “tabbed” browsing, so I can have several browser windows open at the same time.  This is both great and implemented very well.
5. YouTube.  iPhone YouTube isn’t terribly “useful”, but at my son’s baseball game last weekend, someone mentioned a video they’d seen online that was hillarious.  I had it up on the phone in 30 seconds.
6. Visual Voicemail.  If you haven’t seen an iPhone before, “visual voice mail” might be new.  When you have voice mail, it shows up in a list like email would.  You click ‘play’ to listen, and can act on the voicemail in the obvious ways.  The cool thing is that you can rewind the voicemail easily and write down information from it without having to replay the whole thing.  Excellent.
7. Pandora. I’m a big fan of www.pandora.com, which is a free site that lets you build custom “radio stations” to listen to whatever kind of music you want.  When someone mentions a new band I want to check out, I always head to Pandora.  Now I have it on my iPhone, streaming personalized music free over my WiFi or 3G.
8. WiFi. The iPhone does a great job of getting on to WiFi networks, and it saves a lot of battery life relative to 3G.
9. Other Apps. A few other favorite apps I’ve tried so far:

• Facebook: Not full-featured, but lets you update your status, see others’ status, chat, and use the fb inbox.
• NearPics: Shows pictures taken near your current location.  Can’t wait to use this when I’m in DC soon.  It’s pretty slow currently, though.
• Karajan: Ear training software.  I still have trouble telling a 4th from a 5th, but I’m getting better.  My wife is so embarrased by this, because she’s taken semester after semester of ear training & sight singing classes at conservatories.  She’s an ear snob.
• Yelp: Nice application for finding things near where you are.  Works great for finding an interesting lunch place in a new part of town.

So, I’m still loving the iPhone thing.

But I did.

I showed up around 8am at the local Apple store, and saw the line stretching around the block.  My first impulse was to turn around and go home, but I figured I’d hang out for a while and see how the line was moving, at least.  So I lined up with the other mostly not- or self-employed folks to see how our luck fared.

The Apple guys said they would take groups of 10 in, and each group would take about 20 minutes.  True to form, every 20 minutes or so, we’d move forward 10 people or so.  The sense of progress was nice for perhaps an hour and a half.  Then everything stopped.  We had another couple of hours to go that we could see, and for a solid hour, nothing moved.  Apparently, iTunes crashed, so they couldn’t activate the phones.

Ugh.

Then they worked around that, and the AT&T servers died for a while, so they couldn’t do anything at all.  Double ugh.

At about the point where I’d given up and was ready to leave, the line started moving again, and they were clearly selling phones once more.  This was perhaps 3 hours into the ordeal.  All this time, of course, I’m surrounded by the Apple Faithful, extolling the virtues of the iPhone, and Apple in general.  They did really make it easy to stick around, seeing the crazy energy and enthusiasm.

But by this point, we were clearly an hour from being in the store, and I’d already planned to waste the rest of the day playing with the phone, so it didn’t make any difference really whether I waited or played.  So I stuck around.

Once we were just a few people back from the store, we found out that once in the store, it was another hour to get the phone.  I assumed that only a bit of this was in a new, air-conditioned, line, but that was wrong.  It was another hour inside the store just to get started buying the phone.

Once I was in the buying process, we had various gift card-related problems that were quickly resolved, then I asked the nice lady for my new 16 gig iPhone.  She went and got it, then plopped it in the special iPhone bag, along with the case I’d picked out.  Sweet.

We completed the activation process, got my number ported over, then she rang up the total.  It was $100 too low.  So I mentioned to her that I wasn’t getting the smaller 8 gig model, but the big one.  She looked in the bag, and was crestfallen as she, and I, realized that everything was lost.  She’d completely activated the 8 gig iPhone.  The number had moved over to it, and getting a 16 gig was out of the question for about 2 years, unless I wanted to pay the unsubsidized $200-more price.

ARGH.  6 hours in line so I could get the wrong phone.  Thanks?

In the end, I opted for the 8 gig.  It’s $100 less (which I’m now stuck with in Apple Gift Card form, which wasn’t what I really wanted), and may present some storage challenges if I really load it down with applications.

But still, a day later, I have to wonder:  Was it worth 6 hours and a sunburn (oops!) to get this phone?  Pretty much.  The interface is stellar, it’s fast, it has great WiFi support, the 3G is faster than EVDO, the GPS is great, and the App Store presents a new world of mobile possibilities.

So, would I wait in line for 6 hours for an iPhone?  Not knowingly.  But having done it, I don’t regret it.  Much.

Anyhow, it seems to finally be healing, so I’m thrilled about that.  Hoping it’ll be in good shape for Estes Park, CO in August, and maybe D.C. before that.

This is a stack of 10 frames, produced and stacked in k3ccdtools, with our Celestron NexStar 130 SLT and a Logitech QuickCam with a bare CCD inserted as the eyepiece.  Skies were messy, and my focus wasn’t quite right.  Collimation is probably also off.

The culprit?  Bad ad text.

These guys have just one ad variation set up, so it’s tough to say the ad text is definitely at fault, but it’s my first guess.  Luckily, AdWords makes it easy for us to test ad text performance, using “split testing”.  The idea with split testing is that we write two very different ads, we show them each 50% of the time, and whichever gets more clicks is better.  (In reality, tracking conversions is better than clicks, but we’ll keep it simple for now.)

AdWords also has a system where it will rotate the ads for you, figure out which gets more clicks, and run that one more frequently.  This is good for “fire and forget” advertisers who want to set it up and walk away.  If you’re spending $50/month, this is fine.  If you’re spending $500/month or more, it’s worth doing your own testing.

In either case, it makes sense to create perhaps 8 ad variations before launching a new ad group.  Here are some ways I vary ads, to see what resonates well with searchers:

• Ask a question
• Make a promise
• Challenge an assumption
• Vary the headline
• Mix the headline and body rows up
• Change the URL (with/without “www.”, change capitalization, etc.)
• Get specific:  Give your price, timeline, etc.
• Be personal.  Start your introduction process.

Once you’ve set up some variations, you’re ready to test.  If you’re a $50/month “fire and forget” kind of advertiser, head over to ‘Edit Campaign Settings’ and pick “Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often”.  Now put a reminder in your calendar software to come back every month to review AdWords.  Kill the ads that Google has stopped showing, and create variations around the ads that are working well.

If you’re a $500/month advertiser, you have a harder, but more interesting, road ahead.  Set up your ad variations, and pause all but two of them.  Now head to ‘Edit Campaign Settings’ and pick ‘Rotate: Show ads more evenly’.  Google will now show just those two ads, each 50% of the time, while the rest of your variations wait their turn.

Our goal is to get perhaps 30 clicks so we can figure out what’s performing well.  Guess how long it’ll take you to get that many clicks, and set a reminder in your calendar software to come back in a day or a week or whatever.  (I can’t tell you how many ad campaigns I’ve seen where people meant to come back and forgot, only remembering when they got the credit card statement and realized they’d spent WAY more with AdWords than they meant to, on poorly-converting clicks!)

Once you’ve got your 30 clicks, you probably have a clear winner from the first A/B.  Whoever lost, go ahead and delete.  Whoever won is your new “control” ad, the one against others will be measured.

This is important: The “control” ad now has a history with Google, and will be shown higher than a new ad, so you have to make a copy of this ad for the next round of testing.  Pause the “control” ad, make an exact copy, and un-pause one of your other variations.

Now just come back at intervals when you have about 30 clicks, deleting losing ads (and their old copies, if they were a control ad), pausing control ads, making new copies of control ads, and bringing new variations online.  If you’re making money with your ads, great!  You may hate the 50/50 split approach, but you can get more advanced with this and create multiple copies of the control ad so your test is only getting 25% of impressions or whatever.

As you iterate through this process, you’ll probably come up with new ad variations to add to the pool, and you may want to continue iterating likc this forever for highly-converting ads you’re spending a lot on.  If you do really well, you may notice other advertisers stealing your copy.  Sorry, but remember that’s just flattery!

So, once you’ve got the above, what can you do with keywords?  Google lets you target phrases 4 ways:

1. Exact match.  So if a user searches on exactly happy widgets, with no other words, it’s an exact match.  You indicate this in Google with brackets:  [happy widgets]
2. Phrase match. This kind of match occurs if the words are adjacent, but extra words before or after are allowed. “happy widgets” is how you specify this kind of match, and it would match a search on shiny happy widgets or one on happy widgets farming, but not happy farming widgets.
3. Broad match.  This just requires the words in the phrase to be in the search somewhere.  So if in AdWords, you specify happy widgets as your phrase, happy widgets farming would match, as would widgets farming happy.
4. Negative match.  This lets you specify that the words must NOT appear in the search.  If you can identify related searches that should not see your ads, you can avoid showing ads to folks unlikely to click (and very unlikely to convert).  Classics are -free, -jobs, and -class which are common searches, but aren’t buyers.

So once you’ve created a new Ad Group for your important keyword, set up a couple of ad variations for it, and linked it to a page about that phrase, I suggest the following keywords for that group as a starting point:

[happy widgets]
“happy widgets”
happy widgets
-free
-jobs
-class

Naturally, augmenting this with additional close matches from Google’s keyword tool is usually useful, but consider using exact and phrase matches for those as well, if they get many impressions.

The great thing about this is that then you can see how many searchers are using your exact phrase, your phrase with other words, or your words in a different order.  This can be very informative, especially in combination with Google Analytics.