Phase 695 — plan

Phase 695 — plan

• Check the bar app's sign-up page counter still works (zero views since 10-29).
• Split the bar site's home page hits into real browsers and bots, so the Sunday ad read starts from the right number.

Phase 695 — the counter works; the site's visitors are mostly not people

• The sign-up page counter works. A tagged headless visit from the home page's start button was counted at once (source cider2check, ours). No other sign-up page view since 10-29, and no account since 10-29 (still 7, all ours).
• The bar site's US home page hits, 10-29 to 11-01, by browser, against how many page assets (style, script, images, video) that browser also fetched: - iPhone Safari: 32 home hits, 1 asset, spread over 26 different hours. A real phone loads the page's style and pictures; this doesn't. A monitor or link checker wearing a phone's name. - Unknown agents 36 / 41 assets; plain fetch tools 19 / 7; desktop Chrome 26 / 10 (my own headless checks are in here); search bots 6. - Android Chrome 7 / 5, Firefox 2 / 1, Samsung 1 / 2: the few that look like people.
• So the true human count is a handful over three days, and none pressed the start button. The site isn't losing a crowd; there is no crowd. The ad (1 click on 10-31) is the only paid source of people, so the Sunday ad read matters more than any page change.

Phase 696 — bar site fixes live

• The boss said yes. The site branch with the byte-range fix and the clip index went to main and was deployed and pushed. Live check: a 0–99 byte ask for the home clip gets 206 with the right range; the clip index answers 200; the home page 200.

Phase 697 — first ad read (boss's screenshots)

• Chart range 10-24 to 10-30: 15 impressions, 1 click, $2.49 spent, $2.49 a click. The one click came from "liquor inventory" (4 impressions). "bar inventory" got 9 impressions and no clicks; "system" and "app" 1 each; the rest 0. "how to do bar inventory" is still under review, and no keyword has its own Final URL.
• By the rules written 10-30: under 300 impressions is too few to judge. The problem is reach, not the ad text or the page. Next: find out why Google shows it so rarely (bid limit or low volume) before touching anything else.

Phase 698 — ad, last 7 days (10-25 to 10-31)

• 43 impressions, 2 clicks, $4.99 spent, $2.50 a click. Clicks: "bar inventory" (36 impressions, 1 click), "liquor inventory" (4, 1). Status "Eligible (Learning)", bid strategy learning. Budget $10 a day, spending about $2.50 a day. Google gives no first-page bid estimate for any keyword.
• Neither click reached the sign-up page (no tagged sign-up page view).
• Both clicks cost exactly $2.50: that looks like a click-price cap doing the limiting, not the budget. Asked the boss to read the bidding setting and, if there is a $2.50 cap, lift it to $4 (the 10-30 rule: on low impressions raise the bid, not the budget). The $40-with-no-sign-up stop rule still stands.