Over on Shoemoney’s Blog he has a coupon for a free $50 when you sign up with MSN Adcenter. If you don’t know, Adcenter is basically Microsoft’s version of Google Adwords. Since I didn’t have an account with them yet I decided to give it a try and claim my $50. There are some limitations however, it’s only good for new accounts and those based in the U.S. You also have to pay a $5 signup fee.

When I signed up though something caught my attention. Look at the screenshot below, this is a tiny one inch box and you are supposed to read their entire terms and agreement through it! No way to enlarge the box, nowhere to click and read it in a new window. What the heck!!!! I selected everything in the tiny box and pasted it into Microsoft Word and it’s 6 full pages of thick text! Now if that doesn’t make you trust Microsoft I don’t know what will.

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PHP totally amazes me the more I delve into it. PHP is a programming language for the web which is very dynamic and allows you to do all kinds of things with your website. One great ability of PHP is it allows you to completely customize your PPC landing pages with dynamically replaced text. Basically, you can dynamically replace text on your landing page with specific keyword phrases that the visitor was searching for.

Let’s say your landing page is about working from home and you have several keywords, one of them is “free work at home jobs”. Well, with a simple modification to your URL in Adwords and some simple editing of your landing page you could have the title of your landing page be “Free Work At Home Jobs Information” or “We Specialize In Free Work At Home Jobs!” or even “Looking for Free Work At Home Jobs?”. I’m sure you can see the power in doing this. In addition you could even use the keyword in your landing page sales letter copy or your links.

Want to see an example of what I mean?
Put your name in this box, click on submit, then continue reading this article.

Hey that’s pretty cool huh? Well, with PHP it’s very easy to replace any variable such as a keyword or your name and place it anywhere on your page.

So now that you see what can be done with PHP and fully understand what I am talking about, let me show you how you can use this ability on your PPC landing pages.

To start with , you will need to edit the links that you use in Google Adwords or other PPC networks. Basically your URL will need to look like this…

http://www.yoursite.com/page.html?key=YourKeywordHere

or if you have multiple words in your keyword do it like this

http://www.yoursite.com/page.html?key=Your%20Keyword%20Here

Now, all you simply have to do is insert this code somewhere in your HTML…

<?php $keyword = htmlspecialchars($_GET['key']); ?>

And insert this wherever you want the word to appear on your page…

<?php echo $keyword; ?>

Easy enough, right ?

Also, you must either make your webpage end with the extension .php or define MIME types in your hosting account to allow the use of PHP on pages with the .htm or .html extension.

So , I’m sure you can see the possibilities and power of doing this. What I like to do is separate my ad groups out as much as possible, then use dynamic links to customize my landing page as much as possible.

Update: A reader emailed me informing me that this method isn’t 100% safe. Here is what he said…

Outputting the query vars ($_POST/$_GET) directly to your page is a bit risky as it allows other people to actually insert whatever they want, including HTML code, Javascript and in some cases even PHP Vars. This is called XSS (Cross Site Scripting), and it can be misused for various things, like: completely rewriting your page-output, outputting your database connection vars & settings, misleading people, etc.

A quick fix he recommended is to add htmlspecialchars to the piece of code you place in your HTML, I have added this to the example code above. This fix should not be considered completely secure, but is probably the easiest step you can take to provide an adequate level of protection.

Here’s some additional information related to the issue:

General Information

Complete PHP Filter Function

Example Injections

Anyone doing something similar with PPC, have some PHP code to share, need help? Leave a comment.

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