Following on from the previous post about my rant over giving a company carte blanche to debit your credit card, it seems that the same applies to Facebook advertising. Now I particularly wanted to try an advertising campaign on Facebook because it works so differently from Google adwords.  So a solution to my objection had to be found.

My objection is very simple - I don’t like giving anyone the authority to debit my card without my express permission. If there is a dispute, they still have your money while you are arguing, and if it is a large company, the bureaucracy can become nightmarish.

Eventually, I decided on a rather crude approach: I give them a credit card number that has a very low credit limit. If this somehow spirals out of control, at least the damage will be limited. The downside of this approach means that I will have to check the status of the card more often. It requires that the card is signed up with the bank to receive Internet banking facilities which will then allow a daily check on the account status.

That’s my solution. If anyone has a better solution to this dilemma, please leave a comment.

Well, finally we are on-line and fully operational.

The CMS is Wordpress 2.8.3

The shopping cart is WP-eCommerce 3.71

I will blog about WP-eCommerce and the other plug-ins in later posts.

For today’s post, I want to discuss the setting up of a pay-per-click account, and pass on some information that cost me 2 hours of productive time. I first went to Google and set up a Google adwords account. I threw together a simple campaign just to get the hang of how it works and gave Google a budget of $20 to play with for a week. I will watch results and correlate what I see with what I learn. When the $20 runs out I will then have a much better idea of what I am doing and how to proceed. This pay-per-click is quite a lot more complex than it appears at first glance and I am in fully-fledged study mode.

However, the problems arose when I attempted to do the same for the Yahoo and Microsoft/MSN/Bing system. Yahoo has some superb tutorial flash presentations and its site is slick and works well. I especially liked the on-line calculator where I could experiment with the estimated clicks and impressions when I chose different monthly campaign budgets and different keyword bids. This calculator is great. However, the downer came right at the end, after I had set up an entire campaign for a particular targeted product page. They wanted me to sign up for a monthly amount which would be debited each month from my credit card by them. Now, sorrrreeeee, I don’t allow anyone to automatically debit my card. (Fingers burnt too many times). To crown it all, there was no reassuring paragraph or link telling me how I could stop this automatic debit. So, I abandoned Yahoo just in time before giving them my credit card detail.

Then I went across to Microsoft’s ad centre and found I could easily sign up using my MSN account that I have had for years and is used when windows messenger. is used That was a good start. Unfortunately it was downhill from then on. After requiring that an entire advert be crafted before even activating the account, they then wanted a monthly budget in Swedish Kronen. Sorry, not my currency or country. But no apparent way to change it. OK, back-browse, I might have missed something. But while going backwards I realized that I’d better copy/paste all the details of the advert and keywords that I’d created, so as not to have to do it all again. No chance. It wouldn’t allow me to. (No, I wasn’t using my usual Firefox on Microsoft’s site - I was using IE8.) I eventually went all the way back to the beginning and started again, but nowhere did it allow me to change the currency of the monthly budget. What a half-baked unfinished excuse for a system! Do they actually want to make money through this? No wonder Google is coining it hand over fist!  Eventually, I gave up. I still don’t know if Microsoft Ad centre wants to automatically debit my credit card, but when they murmur about a monthly budget without any further information, I get nervous and bail out.

I’ll maybe go back to them once I have cut my teeth on Google’s system. At least these guys seem to have thought it out properly - but wow - what an incredible amount of documentation to wade through, though…