OpenDNS is a domain name system resolutions service. I do not have much knowledge about this all. But I am using OepnDNS since 16 months. To monitor your network you can open an account in OpenDNS. It is useful for security, privacy and child safety.
Using OpenDNS you can easily configure your network for content filtering. You also can block specific domains on a network.
If you are using a dynamic IP address, it is not easy to monitor your network. So OpenDNS has a program for downloading, it is available for MAC, Linux and Windows. It is a small program that will run in system tray and it will send information to OpenDNS for your IP address changes. It is Open DNS Updater, it is only 220 KB. After installing it will ask for your OpenDNS email and password.
If you have more than one network in your account you have to choose a network to monitor for IP changes.
For some marketers, especially B2B companies, the holidays may be a time of year when things slow down, which can be the perfect opportunity to thoroughly cleanse your PPC account and get it to deliver more bang for your buck. On the heels of my blog post on landing page optimization, here are 10 ways to make your PPC campaign more profitable.
Give feedback either by commenting or by replying to my Twitter status.
Make changes that matter.
Don’t just look for what is not performing well in your campaign, look for areas that would have a big impact on your ROI if it were working better. See what campaigns and ad groups within each campaign represent the greatest share of your overall paid search budget.
Once you’ve identified the most critical areas of your campaign to optimize, start by taking a look at your Quality Score. Improving it will help you reduce your cost-per-click in relation to the position of your ads. This involves looking at each keyword’s CTR, associated ads and taking some of the following steps:
Create better targeted ad groups.
Look through your ad groups to find keywords with low Quality Score or low CTR and see what ads are showing up for them. Consider placing these keywords in another ad group with ads that are more relevant. In the case of broad match keywords, use the “See Search Terms” report to find some common queries you are getting clicks for. If some of the keywords that often get clicks are relevant to you, consider using them as a phrase or exact match in the same or new ad group.
Besides using the “See Search Terms” report to better target relevant keywords, use it also add to list of keywords that you do not want to target.
Curate your negative keyword lists.
Add negative keywords to your list so that your ads show for more relevant searches. You can find these in the “See Search Terms” report.
Use broad match modifiers.
If you have not done so already, add the new broad match modifier to your ad groups. This type of matching is more flexible than phrase and exact match while doing a better job of targeting than broad match. Bid on this match type higher than you would on broad match, and lower than phrase and exact match.
Your CTR does not only rely on your keywords, so it’s important that your ads get users to click.
Test your ads.
Look for ways to make your ads stand-out against your competition and test different ideas. Let ads compete against each other and gather sufficient data before eliminating one or more ads. When you come across a test result in one ad group, consider applying what you learned to other ad groups.
Everything I’ve listed so far is primarily meant to increase your CTR. But what about making sure that each click is the best click you can get?
Filter out unwanted clicks.
Provide information in your ad copy that will deter your most common unwanted customers. For example, if your services start at $5,000, consider using that in your ad copy. This may go against our strategy of increasing our CTR, but its benefits may outweigh the loss by increasing the value of each click.
Use match types to control bids.
Look at broad match keywords that are consuming a lot of your budget, without delivering the goods in the form of conversions. Consider reducing your bids on some of those broader keywords and increase bids on phrase and exact match keywords that are delivering good results.
Show ads at the right time.
After doing some preliminary testing by showing ads throughout the day and days of the week, configure your bidding schedule to get your ads more attention when it counts.
I’ve covered most things leading up to the click. Now let’s look at what to do about what visitors see after they click on your ad.
Improve device targeting.
Make sure that if you are targeting mobile devices that you are sending traffic to a mobile-friendly page and that this mobile traffic is in a separate campaign from your desktop computer targeting.
Conduct landing page optimization.
Work on continually improving the conversion rate of your landing pages. At the end of the day, no matter how cheaply you can generate traffic to your website by improving Quality Score or how well you can filter out unwanted clicks, if your pages are not focused on turning each visitor into a client, then you will always be spinning your tires in the mud. If you need a few tips to get you started, check out 84 Tips For A Killer Landing Page Design.
Below is a demonstration of the effects of conversion optimization on ROI:
A simple Google search and you’ll find dozens of really good PHP scripts on the Internet to help you create proxy servers in minutes for free. The only limitation with PHP based proxies is that you require a web server to host the proxy scripts and second, you also need a domain name to act as an address for your proxy site.
If you don’t own a domain or server space, you can still create a personal proxy server for free and that too without requiring any technical knowledge.
Create a Free Proxy Server with Google App Engine
Here’s one such proxy site that you can build for your friends in China or even for your personal use (say for accessing blocked sites from office). This is created using Google App Engine and, contrary to what you assume, the process is quite simple.
Step 2: Click the “Create an Application” button. Since this is your first time, Google will send a verification code via SMS to your mobile phone number. Type the code and you’re all set to create apps with Google App Engine.
Step 3: Choose a sub-domain* that will host your proxy server. Make sure the domain is available, agree to the Google Terms and click save. The sub-domain is also your App ID that will uniquely identify your proxy application.
For this example, we’ll use labnol-proxy-server as the App ID though you are free to choose any other unique name.
Step 4: OK, now that we have reserved the ID, it’s time to create and upload the proxy server application to Google App Engine. Go to python.org, download the 2.6.4 MSI Installer and install Python.
Step 5: Once Python is installed, go to code.google.com, download the Google App Engine SDK for Python and install it.
Step 6: Download this zipproxy file and extract it to some folder on your desktop. The zip file, for the curious, contains a couple of text files (written in HTML and Python) that you can read with notepad.
Step 7: Start the Google App Engine Launcher program from the desktop and set the right values under Edit –> Preferences (see screenshot above).
Step 8. Click File –> Add Existing Application under the Google App Launcher program and browse to the directory that you created in Step 6. Click the Edit button and replace “YOUR_APP_ID” with the ID (sub-domain) that you reserved in Step 3.
Step 9: Click Deploy and your online proxy server is now ready for use. You can experience it live and if any of the steps don’t make sense, please refer to the following video screencast (available in 720p HD).
You can edit the main.html file to change the appearance of your proxy server and you can even add Analytics and AdSense code to your proxy server in case it gets popular on the web. The application is currently open to all users but you can add a layer of authentication so that only users who are logged-in into their Google Accounts can use your web proxy server.
If you have made any changes to your HTML files, you can upload the latest version to Google App Engine either by clicking the “Deploy” button again or use the following command — appcfg.py update <app-directory>
Credits: The proxy server uses code from Mirrorr, an open-source web caching project by Brett Slatkin. Thanks Pratham for your help!
Update: To answer some of your questions:
This proxy works with Flash videos (like YouTube and ABC News) though not with Hulu.
If you are getting the “quota exceed” error, try this mirror site. Update: This has been removed since the App Engine TOS does not allow you to split your app across multiple accounts to make use of the free quotas. So technically, the mirror of the proxy is in violation of the TOS.
As some of you have suggestions, domain with the word “proxy” or “proxies” are banned at workplaces so you may include them in your proxy address.
Though there exist proxy servers for accessing secure sites, this is a basic proxy server that won’t work with sites that require logins (eg, Gmail or Hotmail).
