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Linux touchpad mini-update

A few tiny notes from the land of Linux touchpad improvements:

  1. If you’d like to ensure you’re notified when I have substantive updates on the touchpad driver, I’ve setup a subscription list here: https://tinyletter.com/inedibill. It will be used only for sending updates about the touchpad driver, so probably no more than one email every couplefew months
  2. Matt Mayfield has been doing hero’s work on ensuring that Linux touchpad driver can successfully discard thumb input. His commits to this end are in this branch. In using the libinput debug tool, it’s apparent that Matt’s branch is excellent at allowing a second finger to rest on the touchpad while still taking the active finger input as cursor movement, whereas the latest libinput release tends to interpret any cursor movement with an extra finger down as scrolling. We’re working to make it possible to download an installable version of Matt’s changes soon.
  3. I’ve begun the process of attempting to enumerate the acceleration differences between Linux and Mac here. If anyone else wants to take a stab at concisely describing how acceleration differs on macOS vs Linux touchpad, feel free to drop me a line at bill -at- staticobject.com and I’ll aim to incorporate your findings.

Hoping to have a more robust update on this in the next couple months, or when we get an installable driver available (if sooner).

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What happens if two Google Adwords auto targets have the same bid?

The title of this blog came up recently as we continue to optimize our Google Shopping Adwords bidding tool, and I wanted to share my learnings with future web searchers.    Our situation is that we use Google Shopping PLAs to drive traffic to Bonanza, and our bid amounts are specified via Adwords labels that we apply to each item.  Most items will have multiple Adwords labels, where each Adwords label corresponds to an Adwords auto target.  My question to Google was:  when there is one product that has multiple Adwords labels, and those labels correspond to auto targets that have the same bid, which auto target gets credit for the impression (and subsequent click/conversion)?

The answer, straight from Google, makes a lot of sense:

So the one that enters the auction will be attributed with the clicks and impressions and this is dependent on the performance history associated with that auto target. The one with the stronger performance history – clicks and CTR attributed to it, will enter the auction and hence get the impressions.

Additionally if they are from different ad groups – the past ad group performance history and ad group level CTR would also matter.

Thus the answer:  whichever auto target performs best has the best chance of being shown in Google’s Adwords “auction” (the name they give to the process of choosing which Adword or GS products to show).