We’ve made a couple posts in the past about the $75 in free adCenter credits available to all AppliedI.net hosting customers:

• http://www.appliedi.net/blog/2007/08/08/appliedinet-offers-75-free-adcenter-credit/
• http://www.appliedi.net/blog/2007/08/29/did-someone-say-a-free-webhosting-rebate-325-worth/

and this is but one of the special offers and promotions available to each customer in the appliedi.net marketplace.  Getting $75 in free search engine pay per click ads that show on such sites as MSN and live.com and their affiliated sites translates to your ads in front of 99 million search users and that’s GREAT! But, if you don’t effectively use it, it’s pretty much $75 of free money wasted.  Fortunately, Microsoft adCenter recently released a new tool that will help you pick your keywords and better target your adCenter campaign, the new tool is called “The adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007” and details on it can be found here. In addition on January 23rd they’ll have a free webinar on the Add-in. From a little research, the tool appears to have been developed by adSage and then acquired by Microsoft (yeah, like that never happens).

About the adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007

Based on the Microsoft Keyword Services Platform (KSP) the product has several features including:

• Keyword Expansion – we have included 3 different expansion algorithms: campaign association, fast contained, and category simulation
• Keyword Search Volume Historical and Forecast – we have included daily and monthly keyword traffic data, including forecasting
• Keyword Buzz – you can find buzz keywords in our 300+ verticals
• Keyword Demographic analysis
• Keyword Geographic analysis
• Keyword Categorization
• Keyword Monetization – you can find all monetization information (CPC, CTR, etc.) for your keyword list

Getting started with the adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007

Before we get started let’s make sure you’ve redeemed your $75 in credits from adCenter by following this link. 

In order to get the most out of this article/tutorial I decided to come up with a fictional example. For this example we’re going to pretend we’re a small bed and breakfast in Key West, Florida and we have a very limited budget (let’s say $75 of free PPC because we just followed this link.). We haven’t done any PPC advertising yet so we’re going to launch excel 2007 and use the keyword wizard (you’ve already installed it right?).

Decide how we’re going to generate our keywords

Using the keyword wizard option we have 3 options on how to generate our initial list of keywords. We can extract keywords from a list of websites, pull keywords from one of our existing adCenter campaigns or we could have selected a particular market vertical and picked keywords based on that.

Extracting Keywords

Since our site is brand new, I’m going to extract keywords from some of my competitors websites.   I’m going to launch a browser and go to live.com and do a search for our main keyword “Key West Bed and Breakfast” then get the top 3 or 4 urls for that keyword and put in the textbox for urls.

The reason I’m doing it this way is that these sites already rank very well for organic searches for the main keyword and it’s pretty likely that they have already optimized their keywords on their site for other key keywords in this area. I’m going to then click through the wizard to have it pull the keywords.

Expanding Keywords

Once I’ve extracted my keywords I’m going to expand the list of keywords. This will allow to generate even more keywords based on:

1. an existing PPC campaign
2. other keywords that contain the original keyword
3. similar keywords

For my test I’m going to say other keywords that contain the original keyword and similar keywords. I’m going to limit it to a maximum of 10 (for speed and ease of use you’ll want to play with the confidence factor too to rule out junk keywords (you’ll see what I mean after your first couple runs)).

Keyword KPIs

Once we have these keywords established we’re going to review the Keyword KPIs, the add-in is going to provide us Monthly traffic numbers based on historical and forecasted queries and also let us know how much the cost per click (CPC), click through rate (CTR), impressions and etc are for each of these keywords.

For the traffic reports, we’re going to get the past 12 months of historic data (the maximum is 24 months) and the forecast for the next 3 months (the maximum is 12 months).

For the monetization reports we’ll get the last 30 days.

(Don’t worry we’re almost to the pay-off )

The Wizard’s Results

After stepping through the wizard we’re presented with a pretty comprehensive report detailing the estimated number of impressions, the number of clicks, the click through rate and the cost per click for each keyword.

Some of the really interesting features you’ll find:

• CTR and CPC are both tagged with RED, YELLOW and GREEN images to help you quickly identify which ones are good.
• You’ll see that the clicks and impressions have a little background bar helping to identify which keywords get more traffic than others and more clicks.

All of this information will help us to find keywords that are generating traffic and clicks and give us a good idea of how much each of these keywords will cost per click.

JESS’S TIP: I’m a firm believer in not bidding on the most popular keywords (and thus most expensive) and instead going after the keywords that the other guys are most likely not going after (and thus less expensive)). Looking at the CPC you can get an idea of this. You want to find keywords that have some traffic and a low CPC.

I also like to sort the keywords based on traffic for the previous month and then pick keywords accordingly.

JESS’S TIP: You’ll notice that although we used “key west bed and breakfast” as our main keyword, we got words like fax, photo, location, etc in our results. You can adjust the settings in the wizard to tune these results better through a little trial and error.

Using the Add-in with your existing keyword list.

In the earlier example I showed how you could generate a keyword list using the wizard and the screen captures weren’t all that exciting, I know. If you already have a list of keywords your work is going to be much easier and the functionality of this tool is really going to come alive.

Let’s stick with the keywords for a “Key West Bed and Breakfast” but just use our keywords that contain key west in them:

We’re going to highlight all our words go to monthly traffic and generate a traffic report for monthly traffic for these keywords:

So know we know what kind of traffic to expect for these words each month. Then we’ll run a separate report for monetization to get an idea of how much our clicks are going to cost.

From this report it looks like key west bed and breakfast isn’t a too bad of a word, it’s a little expensive at $0.82 per click but with a 7.6% click through rate it’s a winner. For comparison it looks like key west hotels gets alot more traffic and has an marginal click through rate. A bad keyword seems to be key west inn with a click through of only 0.09% at $1.45 a keyword.

What else can we learn?

But we can get dig in even further than that. Thanks to the new tools we have we can also look at the geographic landscape of where our searches are coming from and also the demographic landscape of who’s searching for these keywords. With this information we can use the geographic information to target where our ads are going to show and we can use the demographic information to tailor our landing pages for the proper gender and age group (and for the keyword “key west boats”, it looks like 60% of searchers are males and majority are in the age group 50-65).

Conclusion

Hopefully the screen shots and little tutorial have shown you just what value the adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007 can provide for your pay per click search engine campaigns. With $75 free adwords credit, it’s a great opportunity to begin experimenting with PPC advertising and see for yourself just why it’s such a popular form of online advertising today.

Joe Healy, a Microsoft Developer Evangelist, recently approached Applied Innovations about assisting him with his hosting needs. Joe runs a pretty active developer website, devfish.net and was outgrowing shared hosting. In fact, like most developers today, Joe wanted more functionality and more control and for a developer like Joe, a Virtual Private Server was the perfect fit.

With our Windows 2003 VPS servers, developers get a semi-managed hosting experience for free. You see, OS updates and security patches are handled at the hardware node so the developer doesn’t have to worry about rushing to his server on patch Tuesday and updating his server. Another benefit is anti-virus is automatically managed on the host node so he doesn’t have to worry about nasties getting dropped on his server.

But most importantly, Joe now has full control of his hosting environment, he can install SQLexpress and IIS and configure them anyway he wants. He can go download the latest beta software and install it on the server. He can tweak the .NET Framework and configuration files, ANYWAY HIS HEART DESIRES. He can also remotely start, stop, reboot, backup and restore his VPS server anytime he pleases.   His server is his own personal domain and he’s the master of his domain!

Joe’s Review

Joe published a review of his experience getting started on his VPS and also pointed out a few tips to help other developers looking to migrate out of shared hosting and into VPS hosting.  We fealt Joe’s comments were very useful and wanted to publish them here and also add some additional information for other VPS administrators. 

You’ll find Joe’s comments below indented and italicized and then my comments not indented. Hopefully it’s not too hard to read.

[Joe's] dummies guide to getting your own virtual server configured (cut 1.0)
I’m sure jess or someone will mod this up once they read it

step1 :: get my VPS setup - basically Applied-I took care of the server setup after listening to what I want. Infrastructure guys scare me, but they took it easy on me.

This was the easy part actually. The important thing to decide when you first get a VPS server (or dedicated server for that matter) is what you’re going to run on your VPS. If you’re not comfortable administering IIS or plan to add a lot of sites you’re probably going to want a control panel installed. The good thing about a control panel is once it’s installed and configured, it’s going to save you alot of time and headaches. Each site will be setup identical to the others and you’ll avoid fat fingered mistakes. The downside to installing a control panel is it’s going to eat up memory that you probably don’t want to lose. You can figure 150-300MB of memory for your control panel to run so make sure you have enough memory in your VPS.

My recommendation is if you’re comfortable managing IIS and securing it, go without the control panel. If you’re new to IIS and administering a server, get the control panel. The headaches it will save will be well worth it.  Most developers also immediately install SQLexpress, I’d advise you to consider a shared SQL database instead but if you must have SQLexpress make sure you set a memory limit on it or you’ll soon find all your server’s memory used up.

step2 :: get stuff to the server - I still use ftp. With IIS7 I’ll go to secure ftp, but ftp was an easy way to get file in and out of the box. I setup a separate ftp address for each domain running on the box and used isolated ftp to map it.  Good instructions for Isolated FTP can be found here -> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555018/en-us

FTP is simple and easy to use. I personally like to map my local drive in terminal services and drag and drop files between my local drive and my personal vps server. It’s easier for me but your mileage may vary.  Windows includes a pretty good FTP server by default but a lot of people are starting to opt for the filezilla ftp server which is opensource and supports secure FTP already.

step3 :: setup the vdir - Create a new website in IIS manager - Setup the host headers in IIS - add in www.devfish.com / devfish.com / www.devfish.net / devfish.net to the host headers - give NETWORK SERVICE security rights to the directory we are going to be using - don’t forget to change the asp.net setting to the right framework version - useful link : http://www.iisanswers.com/articles/dns_for_iis.htm

Host headers are great, a lot of people are still against running sites on host headers because they’re concerned how search engines will see their sites. However, all of the major search engines have come out and said host headers are not a problem. So this is your choice.

Personally, I only use a unique IP on a site when it’s going to run SSL or is going to have many domains pointed to it. Let’s say you have 100 domains you wanted to point at one site, adding all host headers is going to take a couple hours but if you run the site on a unique IP address and only put a binding in for the IP address then you just need to make sure all your host records in the domain’s dns server point to the proper IP and you’re all set. 

One more tip here, if you notice Joe has www.devfish.com, devfish.com, www.devfish.net and devfish.net pointed at his site. The thing is pagerank is still considered pretty important by many people and you generally want everyone linking to your site with just one url. With multiple urls pointing to your website your page rank is going to be split among all those domains/urls. I’d recommend using something like isapi-rewrite from www.helicontech.com and creating 301 redirects. Ofcourse you can also use ASP.NET HTTP Handlers and generate those 301’s assuming your app runs in ASP.net. This way your pagerank isn’t split up. If you want to see an example go to www.applied-innovations.com/blog and www.appliedi.net/blog and pay attention to the url bar. You’ll see they redirect to one url.

Another thing you should consider if you’re running your own web server and hosting more than one domain is using unique application pools and unique anonymous users for each website. By using the unique application pool if one site crashes and takes down the application pool it doesn’t affect the other sites and by using unique usersy if one domain gets compromised (for whatever reason) the user won’t have access to the files of the other websites.  

step4 :: move some content up - Copy up the latest devfish code up to the site. I also took this chance to move to vs2008 on .net 2.0, as well as integrate gatineau into my pages. Browse it from IIS manager, make sure it all works.

A few months back Microsoft purchased livestats from deepmetrix, I’ve been waiting to see what’s coming of that and looks like it’s gatineau. Definitely signup for the beta on that one. I think we’ll see it give google analytics a run for it’s money.

step5 :: redirect my dns - pointed my dns records at www.worldwidedns.net to new vdir - wait 30 minutes - then test it out

This goes back to what I mentioned about decide what you want to run on your VPS. You can run DNS on your VPS if you want or you can use an outside service. In Joe’s case he decided to keep his server lean and mean and used an outside DNS server instead of running DNS on his VPS.

What next? Lots of overhauls I want to do (yes, I know my website looknfeel sux), but first the fish must swim to .NET 3.5. Main concern here will be some of the funky web.config I’ve got and moving some of the ajax stuff over to 3.5 (aka ripping out web.config junkieness and cleaning it up). Shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is a testing situation.

I left this part because I think there’s one more step Joe should do, configure windows firewall. But be careful you don’t want to block terminal services (if you do though it’s an easy fix, just go into the VZPP and stop the services).  Here’s my super secret recipe for configuring Windows Firewall. Open a dos command and copy and paste this block of text into the window it will set exceptions and then start the firewall.

  netsh firewall set opmode enable
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 80 HTTP
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 53 DNS-TCP
  netsh firewall set portopening UDP 53 DNS-UDP
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 21 FTP-Server
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 220 IMAP3
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 143 IMAP4
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 25 SMTP
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 110 POP3
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 3389 RDP
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 443 HTTPS
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 9999 SmarterMail
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 9998 SmarterStats
  netsh firewall set logging droppedpackets=enable
 

This is by no means a perfect set of firewall rules and will need to be tweaked for your own needs but it will get the most common ports open and leave closed the really nasty ports (445, 137-139, 1433, 3306, etc) to the outside world and will also create a logfile in c:\windows\pfirewall.log so you can see what gets dropped/filtered by the firewall and don’t worry in Windows 2003 firewall rules only affect incoming traffic not outgoing traffic. Oh and if you have plesk (or any of the other modern control panels), it can handle managing the firewall for you from it’s web interface.

Closing

Virtual Private Servers are revolutionizing all aspects of the computer industry and the hosting industry is no exception. We’re excited to be a leader in Windows 2003 VPS Hosting and are glad to be able to help developers like Joe and yourself to find the perfect hosting environment. If you have any questions about Windows VPS Hosting please don’t hesitate to ask.