I’m in Guadalajara Mexico tonight on a business trip for my day job as an optical design engineer. I opened up my e-mail this evening to learn that a good friend from our Church congregation is to undergo surgery tomorrow. I called her on the phone and sensed she was calm and confident about the procedure. It turns out the surgeon will use a robotic telesurgery system named after a justifiably famous artist.

I couldn’t restrain myself from mentioning that I had played an extremely small part in designing the molded polymer lenses used in the optical connector for the video transmission cable that connects the remote console with the robotic surgery unit in the system my friend’s surgeon will use.

Kinda cool. Now I have one more reason to pray for the surgeon’s success.

I mentioned in a previous post that a group of MBA students from Kellogg was helping Genlighten with a Google AdWords experiment. They’re part of an annual competition that’s supposed to help teach participants how Google Ads work. Here’s a snapshot of the results they’ve gotten thus far for their ads aimed at recruiting lookup providers:

Provider Campaign Results

I’ve only shown three of the most popular variations of the ads they created. The columns to the right summarize some of the key ways of measuring the ads’ impact:

• “Clicks” is the number of times the ad has been clicked on
• “Impr.” is the number of times the ad has appeared, either on a search results page or on a website that accepts Google ads.
• “CTR” is the click-thru rate, basically the the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. Yup, it’s actually that low.
• “Cost” is how much we’ve  been charged for the clicks we’ve received. The cost of these ads is running around $0.30-$0.50 per click, sometimes even less. During the early part of the campaign, the team set the maximum amount they were willing to pay per click at $0.50. They’ve since raised that slightly.

These metrics make up one component of the “return on investment” calculation we need to do to decide whether Google AdWords are a good way for Genlighten to recruit providers. The other component is the number of interested providers who sign up to download our Provider “How To” Guide and receive an invitation to our private beta after clicking on one of these ads.

Depending on how we count them, that number is probably about 5. That’s out of 150 total clicks across all variations of the provider-oriented ads. So the “conversion rate” — the percentage of those who come to the site via our ads who express interest in becoming providers — is only about 3%. At $0.50 per click, that means we’ll need to pay about $15 to recruit a single provider.

Is that a good result? It depends on how many lookups that provider is able to get clients to order, obviously. But based on what I know now, I’d be pretty happy if we could reproduce that number consistently. I typically spend several times that to recruit providers at genealogy conferences such as those put on by NGS, NERGC and Family History Expos.

But is the comparison an appropriate one? When someone visits my booth at a genealogy conference and expresses interest in becoming one of our providers, it’s usually pretty clear to me that they’re a) serious and b) qualified. I don’t have any such evidence for those who come to our site via AdWords. And I won’t really know for sure until I see how they perform as providers. That concerns me.

For now, though, I’m pleased with the AdWords experiment and the tremendous amount of data we’ve been able to gain from it. In a subsequent post, I’ll talk about our results in trying to attract lookup clients via AdWords.

I’m curious… what do you think of the ads the Kellogg students composed? Would you have clicked on them had you come across them on a Google search results page or on a genealogy website? Please let me know in the comments. Thanks!

Update:  the Industry Standard has an even more credible take on this one.

Well, we’ve all heard that social networking is the “next big thing” in genealogical research. But is the LDS Church really planning a hostile takeover of Facebook to “help monetize its genealogy business”? I’m going to go out on a limb and say…. no, not a chance. Here’s the story, according to respected private equity website TheDeal.com:

“Here’s one you don’t hear every day: The Mormon church is reportedly making a hostile bid for Facebook Inc. Brooklyn blogger Zach Klein says an “employee close to the deal” told him the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints wants the social network to help sanctify, meaning monetize, its large genealogy business.

Idle chatter, hipster hucksterism, blasphemy punishable by an eternity of hell-fire? Who knows (and quite possibly all of the above)? The LDS Church does have money to burn. And Facebook prophet Mark Zuckerberg, with his choir boy demeanor, might make a nice addition to those Tabernacle singers.”

Originating as this rumor does from “Brooklyn blogger Zach Klein”, this one sounds pretty easy to dismiss. Only one problem — TheDeal.com updates its article on the topic with a comment from Lyman Kirkland, ostensibly from LDS Church Public Affairs, denying the rumor. So far so good… but Kirkland’s comment spells the name of the Church incorrectly!

OK, so there’s still no way this is gonna happen. But what if it did? How exactly would owning Facebook help the LDS Church monetize its vast genealogy resources? How would that help further the Church’s overall objectives? And if Facebook is really worth some $15B, how is the Church going to afford the purchase? That’s a lot of tithing!

I was as intrigued as anyone when I read on Dick Eastman’s blog and others earlier this month about Ancestry’s new Chinese-language site, www.jiapu.cn. In my casual familiarity with Chinese culture I’ve noticed a strong dedication to maintaining and respecting family lineage, so bringing sophisticated online genealogy research tools to China seems like a great move on Ancestry’s part to me.

But it got even more interesting when I actually visited the site. I was greeted by an attractive-looking tree logo (brown tree trunk with red leaves) with accompanying red type that looked faintly familiar — not from Ancestry’s existing sites — but from ours! Take a look and see what you think.

OK, so there are plenty of differences:

• Jiapu’s leaves are two different colors and a slightly different shape than ours.
• Our tree has a kind of sunburst in the background illuminating it, but Jiapu’s doesn’t.
• Jiapu’s logo is animated with ‘windblown’ leaves that move off to the right when you mouse over it; ours isn’t animated at all.

But there are also several glaring similarities:

• The jiapu tree trunk is a nearly identical shade of brown as ours; it also is angled up and to the right as ours is
• One of jiapu’s two leaf colors looks the same as ours
• Their name is red with a black tagline; so is ours

So how did this similarity come about? My guess is that it’s random coincidence — yet another example of two sets of talented people working completely independently and coming up with something similar without the benefit of any knowledge of the other’s work. Happens all the time.

I talked in an earlier post about the genesis of our logo. We filed for trademark protection on it in June of this year. I have no idea when and for what countries Ancestry’s jiapu.cn logo was trademarked (though I’m definitely curious).

I probably wouldn’t have even bothered to blog about this issue at all if it weren’t for a certain recent lawsuit filed by Ancestry against Millenia and BTH2. The topic of the lawsuit? Similarities in the color, shape, and wording of two different genealogy companies’ tree logos (among other branding-related elements). Hmm…

I’ve enjoyed today’s Independence Day posts from several of the bloggers I subscribe to via RSS, whether a simple quoting of the Declaration or a video clip of a fictional call to arms from the “President” in the movie Independence Day. I have my own favorite literary reference to the meaning of the Fourth, and I’d like to share it with you, my readers (though I apologize in advance to those who may find it offensive). It’s from Little Town on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. We read the whole “Little House” series to our kids when they were young, and the books continue to have a cherished spot in our family’s shared memories of that time.

The setting is De Smet, South Dakota around 1880. It’s the fourth of July in the tiny town, and a small impromptu celebration has been organized, including horse races and lemonade. A local political type rises to speak, and Laura and her family pay close attention. He begins to read The Declaration of Independence. We’re told:

“Laura and Carrie knew the Declaration by heart, of course, but it gave them a solemn, glorious feeling to hear the words.”

How many of us can say we know it by heart?

The reading of the declaration concludes, and Laura’s narration continues:

“No one cheered. It was more like a moment to say “Amen.” But no one quite knew what to do.

Then Pa began to sing. All at once everyone was singing:

My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing…

Long may our land be bright
With Freedom’s holy light.
Protect us by thy might,
Great God, our King!

The crowd was scattering away by then, but Laura stood stock still. Suddenly she had a completely new thought. The Declaration and the song came together in her mind, and she thought: God is America’s king.

She thought: Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences. No king bosses Pa; he has to boss himself. Why (she thought), when I am a little older, Pa and Ma will stop telling me what to do, and there isn’t anyone else who has a right to give me orders. I will have to make myself be good.

Her whole mind seemed to be lighted up by that thought. This is what it means to be free. It means, you have to be good…

Laura had no time to think any further. Carrier was wondering why she stood so still, and Pa was saying, “This way, girls! There’s the free lemonade!”

Hope you enjoyed Laura’s insights as much as I do. Happy Independence Day!