I just recently created a new site for a client and he decided he wanted to do PPC. I created a landing page for him. I still wanted the users to be able to see the rest of the site but I wanted to show a specific phone number to PPC visitors. I created some PHP code that gives a 10 year cookie to anybody who hits my PPC landing page. On every other page in my site I put in some code that checks for that cookie and gives then a PPC phone number if they find that cookie.
Code for PPC landing page. Must be very first thing on page.
setcookie("ppc", "this works", time()+60*60*24*365*10);
?>
Code for every other page.
if (isset($_COOKIE["ppc"]))
echo 'ppc info';
else
echo 'non ppc info';
?>
You can use that code to display a different logo or image with phone number in it or special text. If you have your phone number all over the place I would put your phone numbers in different include files so that you can change them easily.
Code for include
if (isset($_COOKIE["ppc"]))
include 'ppc-phone.inc';
else
include 'phone.inc';
?>
I blogged about this a while back but did not have the readership that I do now so I thought I would bring it up again because it bears repeating. eWhisper a friend of mine made a suggestion at webmasterworld 2 years ago.
Sometimes, I buy the ‘seo’ terms (allinurl:example.com, link:example.com, etc) to see how active some of my competitors are in checking their links and SEOing their sites.
Knowing which ones are very active, and which ones don’t fret about these searches can help in determining which competitors to keep an eye on, as well as looking for sudden spikes in these queries.
You can use this for many other things. It is a way to keep track of unique terms that you know only certain people would type in. Nobody has to click on the ad they just have to type it in. You will see an impression in your adwords account. You can even have some fun with somebody by using ad text that says something like “George I’m watching you”. You can also do the same thing with other PPC networks.
I just found out that when you pause a campaign in Google Adwords your content network is not paused for 2 days. Google confirms this to be a bug and are working on it.
Graywolf bloged that Adwords requires you to bid very high to enter a competitive area. He spoke with reps at Google through email and then at Webmasterworld PubCon in Boston. He noticed that his only choice was to show up in was to bid enough to be number one. He could not lower his bid a little to get lower like 2 or 3. Google told him he had to pay the high clicks for a few days for them to decide what his “quality score” was.
I have never understood why Google does things the way they do. They don’t think advertisers are smart enough to advertise right. It is very hard to work with Adwords. Your bid seems to have nothing to do with what you pay or where you rank. You can bid $2 and be number one and after a few days you see that you are paying $1.40 per click. You lower your bid to $1.40 you move to number 3 and you pay $0.90 a click. I have a term I want to be number 3 on and it is hard to stay there. I have to move the bid constantly all over the place to get it just right. I don’t want to pay $2 a click but I know I have to bid $2 to only pay $1.40. If I wanted to pay $2 I would have to bid higher than $2.
Google says we do this because our users are important to us and we know what they want. I am so tired of this attitude in Google. They could care less what the user actually want They are only concerned what they think the users want.
I just learned about a new way to search Google sponsored links.
Google has produced yet another free service called the web page creator. that requires you to have a gmail account and another way to show adwords ads. There are no ads yet but the TOS for the Google web page creator says they will put them on. It is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor and the pages you create go on http://gmail_acct_name.googlepages.com/. Google seem to be trying to emulate other free hosting services but with a page creator. This is nothing new. Read more…
On Webmasterworld there are 2 threads on this one for the
advertisers and one for the publishers. Google Adwords has added a
feature so that advertisers have a blacklist of sites that they don’t want
their ad on.
Advertisers
Publishers
There are many issues with this. Will advertisers throw away sales becasue
they are not smart enough to really check a site out before putting them in the
list. Publishers shoudl not be too concerned because most people that are
going to do this already have their ads banned on all content networks
probably.
Well I did the test and found out if you do any regional targeting with adwords you will lose all AOL traffio.
Well today I decided to make a new campaign in adwords. This campaign will only show my ads to people living in Virginia. This should show my ads to people in Virginia. AOL users will all be from Virginia. I am hoping this will work.
