Terry Howard

Personal blog of Terry Howard, guy from Orlando, Florida that likes fishing, literature, technology and saying what's on his mind.

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Terry Howard
Terry Howard
Orlando, Florida
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I Eat Pardoned Turkeys

Posted by Terry Howard @ 11/21/2007

Pardoning turkeys is stupid. Turkeys are for eating. In fact, I think I would vote for a presidential candidate who vowed to eat the turkeys given to them for the length of their term. I also want a shirt that reads "I Eat Pardoned Turkeys".

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Some Advertising Fundamentals

Posted by Terry Howard @ 11/16/2007

A coworker wanting to learn more about some of the basics of paid search advertising asked me to explain a few terms, such as CPC, CPA, CPL, Conversion Rate, and ROI. I thought my response might be of help to others who wanted to know some of these things as well...

CPC = Cost-Per-Click
CPA = Cost-Per-Acquisition (we call this CPL, Cost-Per-Lead, for our purposes, in any case it's the cost per "conversion", but CPC is already taken!)

CPC is just the average paid for traffic, or clicks on your ad, irregardless of what they do after that
CPA/CPL is a measure of how much you had to pay before you get a lead or sale (on the average)

The conversion rate of your CPC gives you a CPL. So like say you are bidding $1.00 for a term. That term got clicked 100 times and it just happened to be $1.00 everytime (for arguments sake). The average CPC was $1, but your overall spend was $100. Let’s say 5 out of those 100 clicks bought something. You had a conversion rate of 5%, and your CPA was $100 (your overall spend) divided by 5 (your total orders), which gives you a CPA of $20. You literally had to pay $20 (averaged) to gain 5 orders.

Your ROI now is something you can only really determine in short order for immediate sales type conversions. Leads could in theory be quantified as an ROI but we’d have to take our average revenue generated by a successfully cultivated lead, divide that by the conversion rate of our leads (how many leads become customers) and get an average value for each lead. We could then use that as our “conversion value” in an ROI equation, which is:

ROI = net revenue / costs x 100%

So in our above example you have 5 orders (or leads), let’s say they were for $400 a piece (or for every 5 leads 1 will become a customer that nets $2000, making your average lead value $400) . Those 5 orders/leads brought in $2000. Now we spent $100 to earn that $2000, so our net revenue from the campaign was $1900 (gross – costs). Now take that net, divide it by the cost again, which gives you 19, which means your campaign was effective by a factor of 19, or more commonly represented as a percentage (x100%) which gives you an ROI of 1900%.

You could then take that number and use it for projections. Given all factors the same we might could expect that plugging in $2000 at a ROI of 1900% would yield $38,000 ($2000 x 1900%.)

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Alton Brown's Fried Turkey

Posted by Terry Howard @ 11/15/2007

This is the process by which I will be frying the turkey. I'm following Alton Brown's recipe, who is my favorite TV chef. He's by far the most knowledgeable cooking expert on TV and always explains the whys and hows of cooking.

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Mmmmmm Fried Turkey

Posted by Terry Howard @ 11/07/2007


Getting geared up for hosting our first Thanksgiving and looking to put together the perfect menu. We want to do the traditional Thanksgiving feast but give it a little something extra and unique. We'll be frying the turkey, which is not all that unique these days (but oh so tasty,) and stuffing and mashed potatoes will surely be in attendance. Just watched an Alton Brown Good Eats where he showed how to make a from scratch souped up version of the green bean casserole that looked fantastic.

I thought about doing some fishing the weekend before and seeing if I couldn't put some nice fish dishes on the table for something different and with a local flare. Anybody have some good interesting fish recipes or any other unique ideas for Thanksgiving?

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The Most Evil Pumpkin

Posted by Terry Howard @ 11/01/2007

What is more evil than Stewie, the conniving infant of the Griffin clan? The Stewie Pumpkin! This was the Full Sail Marketing Department's entry into this year's pumpkin carving contest at the staff Halloween party here at Full Sail. While he didn't win any awards, he was the largest entry and he did manage to disrupt the proceedings by blurting out classic offensive Stewie phrases via the iPod Shuffle hidden on his person. Eventually they figured out how to silence him, but not before he managed to get his voice into most of the footage shot early on. Great work guys, proud to be a member of the most creative marketing team around! See the Flickr set for Stewie.

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Razor Blade in Candy, OMG!

Posted by Terry Howard @ 11/01/2007

Seeing as how in the history of mankind nearly 100% of reports of tampered candy have been the result of either a hoax or by the parents themselves, you'd think the news media and the police would not be such gullible dopes. But casting common sense aside, we buy this teenagers obviously made up story and the hysteria of tampered candy revs up once again. Sigh... When we do finally find out that this jackass is making it up, can we collectively kick him in the nuts for being an uncreative retard?

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