Quick Tip about CNAME's that start or contain the words "ad","ads"

  • 26 July 2012
  • 3 replies
  • 4 views
M

So it don’t know about all the different cases, but at some point we changed our landing page to be our home page because we liked it a lot better.

Well we learned something, if your domain name has a segment that matches “ads” AdBlocker for firefox massacres your web page. So something small you could add to unbounce that would add to the “maturity” of the product, would be that once someone starts to enter certain types of cname’s you pop up a little tip in the UI suggesting why you might not want to use that cname. For example: “ads.tennisrungs.com” results in a jacked up consumer experience for people using adblocker. If you guys did more research into these types of situations, you could help the unknowing marketer prevent them. this particular feature isn’t necessarily a primary value prop, but it’s something that people will talk about when they share their experiences with their peers… “Oh i had this problem, where i created a cname for my landing pages that was blocked by adblocker.” … “Oh yeah? Not me, unbounce warns me about stuff like that before I commit to the cname.” These problems are so hard to detect until you see them youself, you could save people some marketing dollars on wasted PPC clicks probably. I know I have a few, and I know it’s not your fault. Just a smart idea i thought you’d be interested in.

3 replies

CarlSchmidt

Hi Mark, thanks for passing this along, and sorry this was an issue for you. I’ll log this as a feature suggestion. I’m curious, I wonder how many folks who run ad blockers actually click on PPC ads? And don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not discounting the value of this idea at all. I wasn’t able to find much in the way of studies or background information on that. Can you pass along any numbers from your own experience?

M

Thats a good point actually. Theoretically, the people with adblock aren’t clicking on ads. I guess for us the problem was that we decided to make our landing page, our homepage. So for certain people the home page wasn’t working correctly. I don’t know exactly how many people, because I haven’t come up with a good way to detect adblock, but I have a few ideas now. As far as numbers go I don’t have any, right now we do very low volume marketing thats highly targeted and has a decent conversion rate, the volume is so low, that if adblocker is affecting it, it’s not affecting it enough for me to be overly concerned. I just don’t like knowing the home page is jacked up for some people and I haven’t had a chance to fix it yet. If i was aware that CNAME was a bad choice initially, i wouldn’t have to worry about correcting external links now that use it.

The general point of my suggestion was more about implications of certain domain names that you might not think about when you set it up. However, the adblock thing still stucks even if its not costing you PPC clicks. It just seems natural to me at the time to name the CNAME ads since i was marketing ads to landing pages specifically used for ads. I’m currently working on getting it all changed to “info” instead. Just to mitigate the adblock issue.

I realize it’s probably not a high priority feature for you, i just see it as somewhat of a “feel-good” feature, that let’s the customer know you are looking out for them and trying to help them be successful. Since it’s obviously not a feature your application requires, but its definitely a thoughtful feature. I think smart users would recognize that, and it would set you above the rest.

You could use it to detect names that adblock systems cause problems with, or use it to suggest names that would have a better seo impact based on the content of the landing page. (that could also increase the number of domains people want to use, which might cause them to upgrade)

Anyhow, now im just trying to sell the idea. No hard feelings if you don’t implement it. it was just something I wanted share, so maybe others don’t make a similar mistake. It sucks to set it up, and them link to it and find out it doesn’t work for all your visitors. However I do think the adblock users comprise a small percentage of the whole for us.

Ryan

Mark I can let you know that we genuinely appreciate the feedback you provided. I think it’s phenomenal to have a users like you who encourage us to think beyond the core of the app to the next level of user experience. Our product development cycle means we can’t immediately implement all suggestions but when we reflect on possible improvements, it’s feedback like yours that helps foster discussion. Your suggestion demonstrates the value of a community forum.

As part of the Customer Success team, I can say that issues like the one you reported here are particularly great to hear about–regardless of whether or not they make it into the product. It’s very challenging (impossible) for us to be aware of or predict the behaviour of all third party apps, plug-ins, extensions, etc. but knowing about your experience makes it much easier to help other users who might be experiencing the same issue.

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