In 2012 we’re going to continue to focus on what we’ve done exceptionally well for 3 years – making marketing decision making as easy as possible for our clients. John and I launched the company with 3 clients at the beginning of 2009. All three of those clients are still with us – our attrition has been virtually non-existent! That’s because our clients lean on SwellPath for their most important marketing decisions. We inform, support, and facilitate those decisions in ways none of their tools or partners can. We’re going to keep doing that in 2012, and we’re going to find ways to make it better, faster, and ultimately easier for our clients.

Charts and graphs and numbers are great – data should drive decisions. But behind all those things, there ultimately had to be human design. We’ve got an outstanding team here at SwellPath. We added some awesome folks in 2011 (Charles, Dan, Christian, and Danish), and we plan on adding more in 2012. What makes startups fun is the tightness of the relationships that are developed – everything is small and close together. We’re psyched to add more people to the SwellPath team, and develop those relationships. We’re also excited to develop relationships with more clients and partners, and we think we’ll have a lot more of those by the end of 2012.

So that’s a bunch of high-level talk – besides what we’ve always done, anything different? Yes! We’ll have some big announcements this year, so keep your eyes and ears open. We’ve found ways to help way more marketers – we think the “old” way of tackling digital marketing analysis is out – we’re the new.

Finally, what’s with the baby picture? For the first 3 months of 2012, our rockstar Katie Sachse won’t be in the office. Baby Olive was born on 12/31 just before we started 2012. Katie was employee #1 at SwellPath 3 years ago; I still am not used to her not being around. The picture of baby Olive personally reminds me of some things that are important to keep in mind when running a startup. Enjoy it.

• Super “Flashy”
• Creative control down to the pixel
• Can provide great interactive and animated features

• Relies on a plugin to deliver site content
• Users who don’t have or want Flash get a terrible experience
• Search inaccessible

What is SWFObject2?

SWFObject2, Flash, and SEO

How does Google Treat SWFObject2 Content?

Cloaking Concerns when Developing Alternate Content for Flash

Getting Started with SWFObject2 for Flash SEO

How to Disable Flash

The conference is ending with an Ignite-like Super Accelerator session. I’ve thrown my hat in the ring and have a few words of wisdom of my own to impart on the crowd. If are making it to ACCELERATE, make sure you stay through the end and see the Super Accelerator session. The list of presenters is great, and it’s sure to be an entertaining hour. Hope to see you there!

Malcom Gladwell Portrait by Alex Beck

Last week, I found a great TED talk by one of my favorite non-fiction authors Malcolm Gladwell which really got my digital marketer mind moving. I have enjoyed Malcom Gladwell’s works ever since I read Blink for the first time 6 years ago. While I feel he does gloss over some of the more scientific reasons behind his thoughts, I believe he does a great job illustrating interesting concepts about human psychology and its dramatic effects on our environment. This in my opinion, is what we marketers are trying to do every day. As digital marketers our main goal is to understand our customer’s digital needs and desires in an effort to influence them to purchase or consume our said service, product or content. We spend our days filling the world with fantastic campaigns loaded with wonderfully crafted headlines and magical visuals meant to influence our audiences, but are we being as effective as we could be? Below I will be going over concepts from Gladwell’s books Blink and Tipping Point and his TED talk, pointing out 3 cool insights I feel you can walk away with to increase your success rate as a digital marketer.

While most of you I’m sure have read these books, I will warn you right now, this post contains SPOILERS. If you wish not read these spoilers, I would recommend checking them out at your local library or making the purchase from your favorite book outlet.

1)   What can spaghetti sauce and pickles tells us about our audiences?

Here is the video of Malcom Gladwell’s TED talk I mentioned above. If you have some time, I highly recommend watching this whole presentation before reading further.

The first thing I took away form this video is how often I hear the question, “What is the BEST PRACTICE here?” When my client is talking about a specific web page or marketing tactic, and the term “best practices” comes up, I feel it is used in the same way that the Pepsi and Vlasic folks were asking for the “perfect” product for their customers. In my observations marketers and clients are always looking for the “perfect” marketing solution that covers the bases for all of their target audiences. Which in my opinion always leads to muddled concepts and half-assed attempts at speaking to everybody and really never getting through to  anybody. Gladwell illustrates in his examples about how there is not a “perfect pickle or spaghetti sauce” that works for everyone, but rather “perfect pickleS and perfect spaghetti sauceS” that work for certain clusters of people. In marketing we already cluster through our target audiences, but often we forget that within in those audiences we have rather different groups of customers.

I have run into this exact phenomenon while I worked at my previous digital design agency and we were debating a fix for the supposed horrendous side navigation.  My designer and I who we’re “experts” and understood design best practices felt that the current side navigation design made the page look to cluttered and since there was so much copy that side navigation we felt was almost unusable due to the fact that it was really hard to identify any text at all. As we spent the next hour explaining to the client the virtues of cleaning up the nav, she told us, that in fact they had tried to do this the year before and we’re promptly bombarded with support calls and emails form angry customers who now could not find what they were looking for and how dare the company change the navigation which worked so perfectly before. Like most cocky agency folks, my designer and I were not having it, and we wasted 30 minutes of our client’s precious time trying to persuade her that in fact, the way they tried was not properly executed. Luckily she did not budge, she knew the type of  ”pickle” some of her customers liked and no design best practice was going to tell her otherwise. Looking back on this as a more experienced marketer, I would have actually recommended that we run a test where we cookied all previous customers, so that they would always be shown the old side nav and then I would run an A/B test on all the non-cookied visitors testing site interaction and overall conversions for the site to see if a more “best practice” nav performed better if we took out the old customer who likes things the way they are bias out. The takeaways for all of you marketers out there would be; next time you are looking for those best practices that have helped others in the past, take a step back and think about your different audiences and how they are segmented, then ask yourself, am I using the right “pickles”?

2)   Getting the “buy-in” that matters

In the book Blink, Gladwell looks at how some very trained professionals can make some extraordinarily big, seemingly calculated decisions in seconds and be almost 100% accurate. My take away from it, was that people who have been doing things long enough just develop a rhythm with their craft through hours and hours of practice and exposure and literally just “go with their gut.” I think most of us have at least some experience in this, but what about in the marketing world? Sometimes decisions are HUGE and if they end up being wrong and you’re answering to your CEO with your reasoning that “it just felt right”, you probably will be clearing out your desk that afternoon.  Usually we are presenting our work unseen by most of the company outside of high level folks who we need “buy in” from. As we prepare our final presentation to the “big-wigs” before final sign-off, have we taken the time to get the real “buy-in”? For most of the companies I have worked with, there are  people have been talking and working with the real customers for decades, and while they may not know how to use Mail Chimp or Sales Force, they can tell you know from their gut whether a marketing message or visual is going to resonate with the customers. Personally one of my favorite clients always gave us a creative brief full of insights from her trusted folks in customer service and the folks who actually manufactured the product we were marketing before any concepts had been created. No matter what, we saw great results every time we focused on those specific insights from the brief. By speaking with people who fight the good fight everyday, we can get great feedback in a minimal amount of time.  Understandably, we need to respect other people’s time, but I would bet there are a lot of successful marketers who are making time for a quick 5 minute conversation with people at the front lines, like their customer service or engineering folks. I would also bet that an ounce of their insight is worth a pound of their execs. So next time you have that big email campaign to send out, or if you’re going through a site redesign, go talk to those great folks who fight in the trenches day in and day out and see what they have to say.

3)   What SEO/SEM tactics can The Tipping Point teach us?

The Tipping Point, the book that brought the buzzwords “stickiness”, “influencer” and “context” into the lexicon of every modern marketer. I’m not sure if this was the first book to explore how trends and epidemics seem to start in small isolated environments and then almost with out warning, go “viral” and spread exponentially throughout a population, but I’m pretty sure this was the first book that modern business folks read in masses.  The most obvious insights we can glean from The Tipping Point are around Social Media practices. Now there have been numerous posts and presentations about this topic, so I will not write one more word about it. For those of you interested, here is a great presentation on that very topic- Increasing Social Media ROI using Gladwell Tipping Point Framework by Colleen Carrington.

The key-takeaway I got from the book is for those who dabble in the SEO and SEM space. One concept we can take away as digital marketers from The Tipping Point is the idea of predicting trends by watching the trendsetters. For our clients industries there are key people, blogs and publications that represent these trendsetters. Right now, they are using the new “buzz words” that are going to influence how the general population will start to search for terms in your industry in the next few months or years. By identifying these sources and keeping tabs on this content through through RSS feeds or just your weekly readings, you can start identifying these new keywords. Now what are we going to do with these new keywords? Since we are predicting what will be happening in the future buying these keywords and changing copy on our pages right now would not be the wisest move. What we can do though is use Google Insights to track the popularity of these keywords, so when you begin to see an upward trend this is when to start revising content along with getting the jump on some cheap clicks early in the game.  Also, if you use the iGoogle dashboard you can create a gadget for these trended charts to check them out on a daily basis with minimal effort on your part. This simple and straight forward practice can help you start seeing huge gains and make you look like the rock star in your next reporting meeting.

Beyond just Malcolm Gladwell’s works, I’m sure that there is a wealth of knowledge out there as well that we digital marketers would love to apply or own little spin to. I would love to hear from any of you digital marketers, are there are any great not-strictly-marketing focused books or presentations out there that any one would recommend or if you have some other great digital marketing insights you have taken from Gladwell’s works, please let me know in the comments.

Now everyone with Google Analytics can geek out on their real-time data like those of us with Chartbeat have been doing for the last couple years. In all seriousness, real-time reporting is an exciting new feature, and does provide some fantastic insight when there are “momentous” events driving traffic to one’s site. An example might be a rush of traffic from a blog post getting picked up on Digg Reddit. There is a lot of debate in the web analytics community about the value of real-time analytics, with many practitioners saying it is simply monitoring, and not analytics. But with the speed of change these days, and the quickness with which a swell (see what I did there?) can form and move, some type of real-time reporting is necessary.

So will Google put Chartbeat out of business? Hardly; Google has a ways to go before the features are as robust as Chartbeat’s offering. But most sites don’t need most of those features; those that do are already paying the $10/month that Chartbeat starts at. As Google did to the paid analytics platforms when it started to gobble up market share, this will simply force Chartbeat to continue to improve and enhance it’s offering. A challenge Chartbeat is up to, and has proven it is capable of doing for two years. Again Google is pushing the industry, and improving the conditions for all of us.

Finding out about the real-time rollout was one of the more exciting moments at the Google Analytics Partner Summit earlier this month. I am excited for our clients using Google Analytics, and look forward to playing around with it myself. It should roll out to all users over the next couple weeks. Kudos to Google for an impressive enhancement; real-time reporting with the volume of sites Google Analytics is on is no small technical achievement.

I won’t go into detail on specific features, as most of that is still confidential. But here are some basic elements of premium:

• The ability to handle larger sets of data, from collection through analysis.
• The ability to gather more customized information about visitors and visits.
• Deeper integration with Google’s advertising networks, providing richer information and more actionable data for advertisers.
• A more holistic approach to digital analytics.

What’s a GACP? 

Being a GACP means that Google has validated SwellPath’s work in regards to advance implementation of the solution, advanced analysis and very importantly a proven and effective process for engaging our customers and understanding how their business needs translate into web data, insights and areas for optimization.  As a member of the GACP, we now have access to new GA features that are in the testing phase, access to the GACP forum for shared QA among partners and the Google Analytics team and finally an invitation to the annual Google Analytics Partner Summit.

While the majority of the amazing improvements to the platform are not public yet and therefore confidential, we can’t mention specifics on new features or release dates.  GACPs got an inside look at demos of new features that will be rolled out to the public soon and others that are still in the testing phase.  The main takeaway from the new feature demos is that Google is really putting a lot of resources into improvements in data collection, speed, UI and data access.

What does this all mean? 

The gap between the large enterprise solutions and GA will be diminishing over time.  The new features will make GA an even more robust solution and narrow that gap where the current large enterprise solutions have the advantage.  SwellPath has helped clients migrate from enterprise solutions to GA and the “easy” part was building a custom tagging strategy that met the client’s needs and provided, at the very least, the same data collection as they were getting from their enterprise solution.  The big difference was in the UI and reporting options/features/visualizations that the enterprise solutions offered once the implementation was complete.  The enhancements to GA that are currently in the queue will meet or exceed what the other enterprise solutions offer.

So what does Google get out of this? 

Google does like to do things for “free” but why are they aggressively making improvements to GA that will help all of us non-paying GA users do our job?  The writing on the wall was there if you looked at it.  Deeper validation and attribution of ad spend and social media investment.  Can you hear a CMO asking what was our ROI for that $20k social media campaign?

At the Summit, Google showcased some amazing features of Android and Google+.  Why? The data is showing that social spend needs to be justified and therefore measured more precisely (PostRank acquisition) and the dramatic upward momentum in the mobile world is where more and more people will be connecting with the internet, maybe the majority in the near future…  With these massive changes in how and where people engage with the web you can either be reactive and roll out solutions to solve the tracking issues once they surface or proactive and develop a tool that will be prepared to incorporate the changes before they are occurring.  An example of this is the release of the Multi Channel Funnels report.  The data is there for everyone to see but are we even ready to use this data to drive our marketing mix strategy?  Maybe and maybe not quite yet.  Have CMO’s been asking us for the top multi-session funnel paths?  Providing inherent value to each user touch point across multiple sessions from multiple sources is a pretty advanced tactic to try and determine your perfect marketing mix. What it does do is provide more data to validate marketing spend across different ad space via the metric of “assisted conversions”.   BTW – Google makes money selling ads.

There are lots of exciting improvements and announcements coming down the pipe from Google Analytics.  Keep an eye out for some big announcements coming soon and new reporting features being rolled out in the near future.

Finally, thanks to Google for recognizing our expertise. Although we could have applied for the program last year, we chose to wait until we felt like our technical and analytical expertise truly matched or surpassed the other Partners. As our clients on Google Analytics know, we are huge fans of the platform, and we look forward to having a closer relationship with Google and more insight into the future of GA.

Here is a link to our official press release in a PDF format, and here is the copy:

SwellPath approved to become a Google Analytics™ Certified Partner (GACP)
September 7, 2011

SwellPath, a web analytics services provider based in Portland, Oregon, today announced it is entering into a strategic agreement with Google to become a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

Clients working with SwellPath receive professional analytics implementation and consulting services for Google Analytics, a free, enterprise-class online measurement tool. Businesses of all sizes can work with a Certified Partner to receive professional, Google authorized training, implementation, and consulting services to make their websites and ad campaigns more effective. For more information, visit http://www.google.com/analytics/authorized_consultants.html

SwellPath offers custom, advanced and strategic measurement services to clients looking to increase their digital marketing and website performance. Whether you have an established in-house team or are just getting started, SwellPath’s experienced team applies a proven approach to web analytics for a variety of businesses.

“We are excited to become part of the GACP program. Since day 1 we’ve been helping our clients get the maximum value out of their digital efforts with Google Analytics,” said Adam Ware, SwellPath CEO, “ it is great to have Google validate our expertise and bring us into the program.”

“Google is really pushing the product by introducing features like multi-channel attribution, social sharing measurement, and custom variables,” said John Koenig, VP of Marketing & Strategy at SwellPath, “our clients are really able to understand and improve their ROI through the use of our web analytics offering and Google Analytics.

About Google Analytics
Google Analytics tells you exactly how visitors got to your site and how they use it. It can help you identify bottlenecks and gives you ideas for improvements, leaving you to concentrate on your marketing campaigns and increase your returns. Google Analytics is an advanced, easy-to-use tool. The software has all the functions that you’d expect from an advanced web analysis package. For more information, visit www.google.com/analytics

About SwellPath
SwellPath is a digital measurement and marketing agency founded in 2009. The company provides analytics and search services. SwellPath clients include Jive Software, InFocus, KEEN, and Nike Golf. SwellPath is a results-driven organization, focused on helping clients get better measurement and a better return on their digital marketing activities. For more information email info@swellpath.com, or call 503.224.9204.

Two exciting things happened last month in the social sharing space. First, Google released their Facebook killer Google+ and the now ever recognizable +1 share widget. Second, for you fellow Google analytics nerds out there, they made it easier to track all of these share widgets out there with their new social interaction tags. This got me to thinking about sharing as a concept in general. During a digital strategist meetup my good friend Alex C. Williams from Trendline Interactive and I were discussing this topic and how he was trying to increase sharing actions for his client’s email programs. What came out of this conversation was an undeniable fact, 99% of websites and emails have these features, and 99% of them were doing a pretty bad job with them.

As I started my research for this post I began to see what I can only describe as laziness. On most of the sites I visited these poor little widgets looked like they got placed haphazardly somewhere on the page. I could literally see the developer/designer checking it off the “best practices” list. If this is true, then why the hell are there literally billions of dollars being pumped into measuring how many shares, likes, re-tweets, +1’s, karma and all the other verbs people of came up with to describe one simple thought and action – “Hey, I think this content is neat and I bet others would think so too.”  Why are there not hundreds of posts about optimizing these features and functions like we do our button Call to actions (CTA’s) and form designs?

Here’s my opinion on it.

The first thing we must do is think about the placement of those widgets. I believe anywhere in the vicinity of the content you wish to share is good. They can be at the top of the article or after the last sentence of your post works to. Now, the second thing… for Christ oh-mighty please put a frickin headline by it to promote ACTION.  If you just have “share this” written by the buttons you’re better than some, but we both know that just an extra 2 minutes of copy writing could go a long way. If you stop reading this post now and go do this, I’ll have felt this post a success. If you wish to continue, I’ll give you some examples of some surprising sites who are doing this really bad and others that are doing it just right. For those of you who wish to read the whole thing, I’ll conclude with my personal thoughts on what social widgets I think are necessary and which ones you can throw in the trash.

Example #1 – So bad and you won’t believe what site this is.

This comes from one of the leaders in tech and internet news, and you think they would know better. The first thing we see is that the share buttons for the article are 435 pixels downward from the actual article content and then to put the cherry on it, there’s a giant rule dividing the share section. I’m sure the UX people out here would agree, at least put the damn buttons by the damn content. Without some visual cues, how am I really even know what I’m sharing? Rule number one, put these buttons in context with the actual content. The second major fail is the lack of a headline CTA. Where’s the reason I should share?  Why should I click one of these buttons? Rule number two, at least tell me what these buttons are supposed to do. This might be suprising, but this is actually a screenshot from Wired.com. All of their article pages are seriously like this. :(

Example #2 – How can there be so much creative thought put into this blog, but absolutely none into their sharing section?

For this article I asked my good design friend Elliot Olson what some of his favorite design blogs were, and he directed me to Fastcodesign.com. I myself was very impressed with the overall layout and elements. And then I went into a post detail page. Much disappoint ensued.  How can they be doing so many things right visually and than when it comes to sharing this beautiful site to the world, this sound is sadly appropriate. Considering the creativity of the content and overall design of the site, I feel this section should be just as cool as every other piece on this site, but it looks like it just got slapped on because there was whitespace available. See what I did there my designer readers? At least they are better than Wired’s buttons and are placed  in context of the article.

Example #3 – Now we’re getting somewhere.

I did say earlier that there were a few sites out there doing a good job and the Huffington Post is one of them. While, I would agree the amount of real estate taken in the actual article seems a bit much and the share headline is a bit weak. Take a second to look at how much utility they get out of these boxes, AWESOME! They do an amazing job with 8 ways to share, plus a one-click action email signup…bravo. Notice that this does not end up looking like a Nascar stock car like we see in some sites out there. Designers and developers take note, with a little bit spacing and background colors these pesky buttons can not only look great, but the amount of utility in such a small space can be dramatic. The placement is also great with absolutely no confusion about what article you will be sharing. Huffington post you definitely get my “SHARE ALL THE THINGS AWARD”, nice work.

Example #4 – My personal fave.

Now this last example might not be the best one out there, but I think it illustrates the points I’m trying to make, plus it’s on my favorite analytics blog, Occum’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik . Besides just being overly simple and to the point, it exemplifies what just 2 more minutes thinking about the “headline CTA” can do. Why yes Avinash, I did like this post. Ok, I’ll share it. See, this isn’t hard to do. His placement is also nice, right at the end of the article, no design elements, just a relevent CTA, some buttons and voila. We’ll also give extra points to for having some old school share buttons for the paper pushers out there.

I promised some thoughts on what actual share buttons you should have and what you can throw in the trash, so here it goes. No matter who you are or what your site is about have the big 3 – Facebook’s Like, Google+’s +1, and Twitter’s Re-tweet. They make it so easy to add these buttons and everyone uses at least one of these sites, so stop being lazy and do it. Now comes the hard part, what about all the rest? Is your audience b2b? I would say LinkedIn would be a smart choice. Is your content weird photos in Portland? Perhaps you should have a Stumbleupon button or maybe a reddit link (Digg is dead. Sorry Kevin.). Better yet, look at your data that you collect on your site and see if you historically have gotten referral traffic from one of these sites, if so ADD IT!!! Lastly, for those of you who use Sharethis or Addthis icons, personally I believe these are relics from when we were trying to figure out what this share thing was going to be about. Personally, the metrics I have seen on these being used on sites have been abysmal at best. Last but not least, email sharing. I’m going to get some flack for this, but honestly when was the last time you actually wrote someone an email to share some web content? That’s what I thought. Now let’s go SHARE ALL THE THINGS!

Thankfully, it’s easy to set up conversion tracking for Google AdWords. Just tag your conversion event and you’re set (I’ve over simplified this, admittedly). However, what if your business relies partially (or completely) on phone calls as the conversion event? You can’t put a conversion code on your website’s phone number and expect PPC visitors to click it. For the same reason, you can’t put messages on your landing pages telling visitors, “if you clicked on an ad to get here and need more information, call…” some PPC-dedicated phone number. Well, turns out you can; I’ve seen it done. When you really think about it, a phone number makes PPC attribution about as clumsy and random as a blaster.

Well, here’s a more elegant solution for a more civilized age: dynamic website headers. One of the most common locations for a website’s phone number is in its global header (the footer’s less common, so we’ll stick with the header).

Functionality that changes the global header based on the visitor’s source would be all you needed to attribute phone calls to PPC; just make sure you have one dedicated phone line for PPC so you know which source leads come from.

So we know the solution is dynamic headers, but how do we get there? PHP! If you’re website’s server is set up with PHP, you’re in luck. If not, the theory behind this method can be used with any server-side language. Here’s how we do it.

Break Out Your Global Header

If your website is built using static HTML, you’ll have some adjustments to make. You need to break out your global header from the rest of the page. Doing this is actually one of the great things you can use PHP for. While your page content changes page-to-page (if it doesn’t change, you have an extremely boring site), certain elements always the same: the navigation, the footer, and especially the header. While I don’t have the time or space to get into a full PHP lesson here, what you’ll essentially need to do is call in your global header using the “includes” PHP function instead of embedding the HTML on the page.

The file for the header (header.php) can live in an “includes” directory on your server. The file itself can just be the raw HTML that was once in embedded on every page of your site. A nice side benefit is that if you want to change anything in your header in the future, you only need to do it in one place. Neat, huh?

Click for a closer look at the code

Fortunately, many sites already use this functionality. WordPress does it right out of the box. If you’re site doesn’t have this set up already, it’ll take a little bit of work, but it’ll be worth it in the long run.

Create a PPC Global Header

We want the same header with the same phone number to be displayed everywhere on the site, except when a visitor comes from PPC; in that case, we want them to see the PPC-dedicated phone number only. To do that, we first need to create another header file in the “includes” directory that uses the PPC-dedicated phone number instead of the normal one. Just copy your header.php, rename it ppcheader.php and update the phone number. That’s all we need to do for now. We’ll build out some neat code to call that in at the appropriate time later on.

Use a Query String Parameter

Before we get into actually calling the special PPC header we just made, let’s figure out how we are going to send the message to the site that a visitor actually came from PPC. A simple way is to use a query string parameter. You’ve no doubt seen these in use before. They look something like this:

http://www.swellpath.com/eppcaw.php?parameter=value

At this point, all you need to do is decide on your parameter name and the value. Later on, we’ll check to make sure the parameter exists and matches the correct value before returning the PPC header.

For simplicity, I like to set the parameter as PPC and the value as TRUE.

http://www.swellpath.com/eppaw.php?ppc=true

Check for the Parameter and Set a Cookie

Ready for the code-heavy section? Like I said previously, this can’t be a full on PHP lesson, but I’ll try to explain the theory behind each piece of code.

To keep things organized, the code we build out in the following steps should live as its own file in the “includes” directory. Let’s name the whole thing campaignTracking.php. I’ll explain how and where to call this code into your page later on.

The first thing we’ll want to do is check if the PPC parameter equals TRUE.

if($_GET[“ppc”] == “true”)

This snippet uses the $_GET super global (you don’t need to know what a super global is) to grab the PPC parameter and check if it is equal to “true”. If it that checks out, then we want to tell our website that, “yes, this person came from PPC”. That’s where the cookie comes in. A cookie is a bit of info stored in a visitor’s browser that we can reference to call the appropriate header. This also lets us display the PPC header on every page they visit throughout the site since it’s stored in their browser and essentially follows them around.
The value of the cookie we set is arbitrary, but let’s make in easy to understand and make it equal to “sourcePPC” so we know that the “source is PPC”.

$cookieValue = “sourcePPC”;

After we define the cookie’s value, we can use PHP’s “setcookie” function to set a cookie in the visitor’s browser.

setcookie(“SwellPathCampaignTracking”, $cookieValue, time()+60*60*24*90);

The line above sets a cookie named “SwellPathCampaignTracking” equal to our specified cookie value and makes it last for the next 90 days. The setting the expiration date 90 days in the future, we can display our PPC header for that same visitor even if they leave and come back. Essentially, we want to account for people discovering the site through PPC, leaving, and then coming back to convert via phone.

Finally, we want to set something that’s easy to use when we want to call in our PPC header. We’ll call our variable “cookie” and make it equal the same thing as “cookieValue” (which is “sourcePPC”).

$cookie = $cookieValue;

Remember that we only want everything above to happen if our PPC parameter is TRUE. So, we’ll wrap that all up within an ‘if’ statement.

if($_GET["ppc"] == “true”)
{

$cookieValue = “sourcePPC”;
setcookie(“ReboundCampaignTracking”, $cookieValue, time()+60*60*24*90);
$cookie = $cookieValue;

}

The last thing to address, before we move on, is to allow the cookie variable to be set regardless of what page the visitor navigates to (provided they came from PPC).

else {

$cookie = $_COOKIE["SwellPathCampaignTracking"];

}

The statement above sets the cookie variable to whatever is stored in the visitor’s browser as SwellPathCampaignTracking. If they’ve visited the site before via PPC, they’ll have that cookie set and the cookie variable will be set correctly. If it’s a visitor from direct, referral, or organic sources, they won’t have a CampaignTracking cookie stored in their browser and the cookie variable will be empty.

Completed code:

Click for a closer look at the code

The Switchup

Now that we have all that deep coding out of the way, we can do the actual fun part and write our code that will switchup the header. We’ll do this based on the value of the cookie variable.

Remember when we broke out our global header into header.php and ppcheader.php? This section would suck without it. Basically, if the cookie variable equals “sourcePPC” we use ppcheader.php when PHP builds the page. If it doesn’t equal that or isn’t set, we use the standard header.php. Again, for organization, keep this code in the “includes” directory as its own file. Call it switchup.php

Click for a closer look at the code

Putting it all Together Like A Boss

Now that you’ve built out all your code (like a boss), it’s time to put it all together to make a page.

Note that in order for this whole thing to work, campaignTracking.php needs to fire before anything else. If you don’t check for the parameter and set the cookie before PHP builds the rest of the page, it’ll be too late and you won’t get to pull in the cool PPC header. TL;DR: make sure to include campaignTracking.php before the first tag.

Just so there’s no confusion, remember that the of an HTML document and the header are not the same. The section contains info about the page and calls in other cool stuff like JavaScript and CSS. The header is a piece of the visible, user-facing site that will always be within the tag.

Click for a closer look at the code

Finally, make sure that you use this layout on every page of your site that you want to enable the PPC-dedicated phone number on. It’s not uncommon to have a different PHP template for your custom PPC landing pages than the one used on the rest of your site. If you have a blog, it likely has it’s own PHP template as well that’ll need to be updated.

Making it Work with Your PPC Campaign

You barely need to change anything in your PPC campaigns to make this work. Simply append “?ppc=true” to your landing page URLs when you build your ads. (If you already use query string parameters, just add &ppc=true).

http://www.swellpath.com/eppcaw.php?ppc=true

http://www.swellpath.com/eppcaw.php?v=10&ppc=true

When a PPC visitor clicks through on one of your ads, all of our awesome PHP code with execute and return the PPC header with the PPC-dedicated phone number. Since we set a persistent cookie, the PPC header will be displayed on every page they visit and not just the first landing page they hit.

Bam! Enhanced PPC Attribution with PHP, or EPPCAwPHP, if you want to be cool.