Category: Computer Related – Advanced

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How to Type € or £ or ¥ Symbols

Besides our $ sign, the Euro, Japanese Yen symbol and Sterling pound are probably the most common currency symbols used in Australia. The standard US keyboard used in Australia can produce these symbols. Here’s the quick way to do it in Windows;
For €, hold down Alt key whilst typing 0128.
For £, hold down Alt key whilst typing 0163.
For ¥ hold Alt while typing 0165.

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Anoox – Scam, Fraud, Thieves or…?

Just a bit of a heads up to those interested in internet marketing.
I put $50 down for pay per click advertising on a minor search engine, Anoox.
I entered 33 keywords and advertisements and logged the results each day.
After 12 days I observed that their reported clicks were significantly higher than the visits reported by Google Analytics.
I queried Anoox on it. I said,
“According to my Anoox results page all 30 ads that point to www.DefeatDegenerativeDisease.com have pulled a combined total of 98 clicks. For the same 12 day period Google reports the total number of visits as 31, 5 of them from Anoox.”
Their reply:
“We have no relationship or control over Google reporting.
So we have no idea why they would not be reporting clicks that our system says you have received. But we can tell you this that in fact we do not count to your account many clicks that our system considers to be dubious as to their pattern of clicking.
With that said, since we aggressively under cut the prices that google charges for pay-per-click Advertising, it could be, although we are not saying that it is, that they are under reporting our clicks. But again we have NO control or relationship with Google so we cannot definitely state as to why their software system is doing what.”
So I asked:
“Can you suggest an alternative tool to Google Analytics so I can audit or cross check their reported results?”
Their response:
“Really the best way to track clicks on your Ads to your Web site is to write the code by your company. This is the sort of accounting that cannot be trusted to a big (search engine) company that by definition cannot pay attention to details of your particular case.”
Now, they didn’t know it but I happen to be a programmer, so while that is, in my case, technically feasible, if totally impractical, what genius would ever suggest that to an end user?
So, on the million to one shot that their maligning of Google had some substance to it, I found another web site visit tracker, GetClicky, and installed the tracking code for it. I left the Google tracking code on the page so I could compare results from the two analytics tools.
I also checked my web site hosting control panel and looked at the site visits as reported by Awstats. Most web site hosting companies provide some basic statistical reporting. I am told the reason Awstats reports more visitors for the same time frame compared to Google or GetClicky as that the latter two filter out automated traffic like search engine bots and the like that Awstats doesn’t.
Anoox claim to have sent my site 97 visitors in the last 7 days.
Awstats only report on a calendar month. For the entire month of February Awstats reports only 89 unique visits.
That’s less visits for the two weeks than Anoox reports for the week.
Google reports 22 visits in last 7 days (Feb 7-13th), only _3_ coming from Anoox.
GetClicky reports 23 visits in last 7 days (Feb 7-13th). (They do not break the visits down by source.)
GetClicky returns a similar number of visits to Google but provides no source of visit breakdown, which I find useful. I used GetClicky purely as a cross check to investigate suggestions of impropriety on Google’s part. Turns out it blows them totally out of the water.
So three other site visit reporting tools offer a wildly different number of visits than those for which Anoox claims to have generated and for which I am charged.
Data from three other sources suggest Anoox to be charging for 10-20 times more clicks than for which they are responsible for visitors.