Friday October 26th 2007, 11:09 am
Filed under: Underground
Going against the common way of thinking
All of your adwords tips basically include using relevant keyphrases in the ad text, call to action, and so on. Blah , blah, blah. In all of the adwords tips you have read, what is out of the realm of common sense? Here’s one tip- try something completely different.
Try out using the maximum number of longtail keyphrases and use the lowest bid possible. A lot of marketers will tell you that the age of loading 4000 keywords in an ad group is over. Ok, but have you attempted loading 4000 keywords at the lowest bid and seeing for yourself what happens? You may be pleasantly surprised. I’ve even lowered bids to the lowest possible for my heavy hitting keyphrases and seen better conversions. Who woulda thunkit?
After about page five in the SERPS, a lot of bulk advertisers start pulling in the typed search phrase into the ad headline. Try keeping yours unique. Its easy to stand out if your ad is different from the rest. It will continue to be different and stand out more the further you continue in the SERPS. I’ve seen this work results even when I have the number one organic position. If I miss them the first time, hammer them further down the line is what I say.
Vary you ads ever so slightly and use a different landing page for each. Although it is called A/B testing, try out A/B/C/D/E/F/G or as many as you can. The more the better and let’em run.
A report I’ve seen rarely mentioned is the Search Query report in adwords. Use it and run it regularly. A lot of weird stuff shows up in the report and use the data found there to drive your negative keyword list.
Can’t think of a good headline? Dive down in your Analytics and see for yourself what people are typing and use that for a change. “Where to find widgets” or “Where to buy widgets” in the headline- why not I wonder?
Don’t get trapped into the “it worked before” or “everyone’s doing it this way” mantra. Go against the grain and use data to back up your tests. If the ads are not delivering a positive rate of return, kill them and do it swiftly. Don’t bring in your personal feelings about what you think should work or what you think is an exceptional witty ad that you feel should stay for whatever reason.
Thursday July 12th 2007, 9:44 am
Filed under: Underground
Developing a Facebook application on a server hosted with GoDaddy, we kept on getting a parse error on line# such and such when the application was tested.
What was the problem?
The problem was that GoDaddy runs php version 4 and version 5 concurrently with the Linux hosting configuration 2.0 . Facebook applications only run on php version 5. When checking the version of php, the script <?php phpinfo(); ?> indicates that GoDaddy is running php version 4.3.
How to fix this?
Well, there are a lot of proposed fixes out there. Difficult to find and GoDaddy documentation and customer service is unclear and muddled. The simple fix, include a .htaccess file in the root directory with the following line below:
AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php
Netflix is offering a prize of $1,000,000 to whomever can increase the productivity of their Cinematch system by 10%. Cinematch groups movies into “clusters” drawn on ratings provided by Netflix users. Based upon an algorithm designed by a now Google employee, the system bears a resemblance to the Google algorithm which groups websites into similar neighborhoods connected by links. Another internet contest, Globalwarming awareness2007, is also offering a prize in what is billed as the “SEO World Championship”. Instead of bombarding the internet with movie recommendations, the internet is being bombarded with websites around the topic of globalwarming awareness in 2007.
Time to dust off the dirt on your URLs. When writing content, replication is something you should try to avoid. When you have hundreds of pages, its difficult to make every page unique.
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Especially if you have an ecommerce site where pages also look very similar to other merchant sites with the same products. Other merchants tend to use the same descriptions provided by vendors. Different URLS with Similar Text or DUST is the new buzzword. We’ve been checking out some abstracts and white papers to help bury this problem.
