AFFILIATE CITIZEN

Quick and Easy way to Make Phrase and Exact Match Keywords

One of the most time consuming aspects of manually entering keywords into a PPC campaign on Google Adwords is having to put speech marks (phrase) or brackets (exact) around keywords you wish to use on these options.

Now unless im being stupid there is no way apart from using the keyword tool to automate this process – if someone knows please let me know!

A Solution

Ive come up with a quick and dirty solution using a bit of PHP:

tool is no longer available, sorry!

Simply enter your keywords in the textarea on the left as you would do if you wanted to use the broad match option on adwords (that is no ” ” or [ ]). When you have done that press the convert button and your keywords will be nicely arranged into phrase and exact match for you to copy and paste straight into adwords!

I hope everyone finds this useful, please comment below!

The Script

This post takes the affiliate redirect script tutorial I posted previously here and suggests ways you can build upon it, apart from the obvious redirection to the merchant’s page.

The Redirect

Now although users dont actually see any kind of redirect because the PHP script is server side it is nonetheless something they do pass through and so we can take advantage of that fact. Ok lets get down to some cool ways in which you can enhance your simple redirect:

Cool Thing 1: Make a ‘Popular Products’ Database

If you have a site which relies on a datafeed to populate it, whether it be from a sole merchant or in the form of price comparison, you can use this method to create a pseudo popular products section on your site. I say pseudo becuase you wont be able to tell which products have actually been sold, just which products interested the users (and prompted a clickthrough your redirect script).

Im not going to go through the technical aspects of this completely, im just going to cover the theory but suffice to say you will need a database backend of some kind installed on your server. If anyone wants to explicitly know how to do this please email me and if there is enough demand I will set it out in a single post. The same goes for the other 4 cool methods ill outline later. Now..onto the ‘Popular Products’.

Ok so you have a page of products infront of the user, lets say for example you have 10 different mobile phones. Each one is connected to your redirect script which then queries the database for the correct deeplink to carry the user over to the merchant. All well and good. To make the popular products DB you will need to also get additional row values from the DB. This could be, in addition to the deeplink, the name, price, id (unique id) and description. You will then need to construct a new query which adds this information into a NEW popular products DB. Be sure to also add a datetime value for each row as you can then display a ‘recently viewed’ popular products bar on your homepage which is constantly freshened by users clicking on your site! Why not also add deeplinks to the product pages on your site into the DB?

Cool Thing 2: Send Yourself an Email when a product is clicked.

This is for those of you who are really analytical in your approach and require that extra level of granularity without using a DB or log. I use this approach to guage the popularity of some areas while using PPC or sometimes SEO. It gives me a sense that the site is live and things are happening. You can also get a good feel for tallying up clicks on either the PPC engine you are using or the merchant/network’s reporting interface.

Ok, heres an example bit of code. It assumes you have queried the DB already and pulled out any info you may need to send in the email  to yourself.

///////////////////////////////SENDTRACKING MAIL///////////////////
$emess = "CLICKTIME: $time\n\n";
$emess.= "PRODUCT NAME: $name \n";
$emess.= "LINK: http://www.yousite.com/productdeeplinkpage.php"\n";
$ehead="From: YOUR WEBSITE";
$subj = "CLICKTHROUGH FROM PRODUCT SECTION";
$mailsend=mail("you@yoursite.com,","$subj","$emess","$ehead");
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////


So this little bit of code will send you an email with the clicktime (using PHP’s time functions to establish the NOW time), the product name (pulled from  the DB) and a link to the page the user has clicked on – just for fun.

Lets Start with a Bang!

Ok so to kick off the new blog im going to post about a technical solution to a problem that was raised recently on the A4U forum. The subject raised was how to implement affiliate link masking using a server side scripting language. Now as im fairly fluent in PHP and have also made said scripts it seems a great idea to share them. You need to be able to code a little in PHP to use this and also able to upload to your server (which im assuming most readers should be able to do!).

The Elements

There are three elements we need to get the masking going:

• The robots.txt file – a simple txt file than is specifically targeted towards controlling the behaviour of search engine robots. Its proper purpose is to restrict some areas of websites that are considered private or have some kind of security sensitivities, or, are out of date.
• The redirect page. In this case we we call our page redirect.php – easy.
• The new affiliate links. These will be the links to the redirect page that you will need to write into your pages when everything is in place.

The Robots.txt File

Open up a text editor of your choice (notepad for purists ) and the following code is all you will need:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: redirect.php
User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: redirect.php
User-agent: slurp
Disallow: redirect.php

The ‘User-agent’ refers to the robot of a certain search engine. So googlebot for Google and msnbot for MSN etc. Different search engines have different bot names so if you want to block others aside from the big three you’ll need to find out their descriptions before you go ahead and add lines to your robots.txt file. The ‘disallow’ line tells the robot that it cannot crawl that file. In this case the redirect.php file will be in the root of the server to make it easier.  Save and upload your completed robots.txt file to the root of your server.

The Redirect Page

Open up your favourite text editor or website creator and begin a new PHP file. You’ll need to add the following lines of code:

<?
$linkid = $_GET['linkid'];
if ($linkid == "") {$link = "http://www.yoursite.com";}
if ($linkid == "1") {$link = "http://www.merchant1.com/";}
if ($linkid == "2") {$link = "http://www.merchant2.com/";}
header("Location: $link");
exit();
?>

Lets look at the code. The $linkid variable is provided in the links we will use from the pages with affiliate links on  -  more on that in a moment. Each link is assigned a number and placed into a conditional statement. The statement compares the $linkid value and assigns the $link variable the correct url. The final two lines then forward the browser to the $link location url using the header function in php. Add as many links as you need, most probably every time you add a new link to your site that needs masking. Save this file as redirect.php and upload to the root of your PHP enabled server. We now need one more essential element….

The New Affiliate Links

Previously your links may have looked like this for all to see:

http://scripts.affiliatefuture.com/AFClick.asp?affiliateID=xxxxx&merchantID=xxxx&programmeID=xxxx&mediaID=x

Take the raw affiliate links and place them into your redirect.php file. Assign them numbers as described above. Lets say for now the affiliate future link above is named as ‘1′. Now you are ready to write your new link just like this:

<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/redirect.php?linkid=1">Affiliate Future Merchant Name</a>

And voila! The new link should now go through the redirect page and the search engines (well those that obey the robots.txt file) won’t see it. If you are really paranoid about search engines following afiliate links try adding rel=”noindex, nofollow” to your masked links.

There are many other things you can do with a redirect script to help with analytics and monitoring of your websites, one example is to add popular links (or products) to a database on the fly. Another is to send an email to yourself if a link has been clicked. Ill cover that in another post soon!