Test your popups on the cheap and easy with a tiny .htacess trick

This post is for the less technically inclined using PPV. While you can see  your pop-ups on a contextual network by browsing the site/keywords you are bidding on with whatever “web experience enhancer” causes them to pop installed, this has a few drawbacks:

  • If your bids are high, you’re kinda wasting money and messing your stats.
  • If you browse a low-bid/low-activity URL and interact with your pop-up, you end up screwing up your CTR stats.
  • If you remember to add a low-traffic unrelated URL to the campaign, you have to contend with two problems: 1- The ad network will sometimes not approve it, for example they might not approve a diet pill pop-up on a seemingly harmless nursing mother website. 2- You have to come up with different URLs that actually exist each time or you’ll really mess up.

Solution for dumb people like myself: A simple .htaccess file that invisibly rewrites ALL requests for anything inside a folder to a simple “TEST” page.

The HTACCESS snippet:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
	Options +FollowSymlinks
	RewriteEngine on
	RewriteRule ^(.*)$ test.html [L]
</IfModule>

 

The Dummy HTML file:

<html>
<body>
This is a test page
</body>
</html>

How to use:

  • Hopefully your server runs Apache like most of the web. If you have no clue what your web server runs, give up now before the gurus take all your money.
  • Save the HTACCESS snippet to a file named “.htaccess” (lowecase letters, please, and don’t forget the leading period)
  • Upload your new .htaccess to a new empty subdirectory, for example “/testingpop” so you can access that directory as “http://mydomain.com/testingpop&#8221;
  • Save the Dummy HTML file snippet to a file named “test.html”
  • Upload test.html to the same directory where you put the new .htaccess file
  • When you add targets to a campaign, simply add as a target this subdirectory and append the name of your campaign without any spaces. For example, if you were selling self-confidence courses you might add a url like “http://mydomain.com/testingpop/USA-Grow-your-dick-03&#8243;

When you access that target you added to your campaigns on the last step, it will always work, it will always get approved because it just says “This is a test”, it will always have the minimum bid and will always be unique because you used the campaign name, its easy to remember, contains no sodium or CFCs and was never tested on animals although I did kick the dog at random intervals while writing this post just to remind him who the alpha male is around here.

If you had ADD, this is what you’d get from this post:

Man Kicking Dog

I kick the dog at random intervals just to remind him who the alpha male is around here