AdBlock is great, but use with caution

If you get annoyed with ads like me, you probably use Firefox with the Adblock Plus plugin. It's a great way to get your content without the fuss of advertisements. However, as a marketer I also run ads on Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Adcenter.

I ran into a problem when I logged into Yahoo Search Marketing on April 25, 2009 when I could not see any charts nor could I do any administration on my account nor could I manage my keywords. Since there was an alert at the top mentioning site maintenance I just left it. Then when this issue persisted to Tuesday April 28, 2009 and support was saying they didn't have any trouble seeing my account I realized the issue must have been because of my Adblock plugin. When I disabled my Adblock for Yahoo and refreshed the page I could see everything again. Doh!

Yahoo Search Marketing and Firefox Adblock used to coexist nicely before so an update must have come with either the new 1.0.2 Adblock update or my EasyList USA filter subscription.

So as a warning to all Firefox Adblock users... be careful when using Adblock. You could lose important content at any time. Be sure to unblock from time to time, even on websites you frequently visit.

Binding an Enum to a DropDownList in C#

I find it useful to keep common dropdown lists such as "categories" in an enum. Here is a useful function to bind that enum type to a DataTable in C#.

public static DataTable BindToEnum(Type enumType)
{
String[] names = System.Enum.GetNames(enumType);
Array values = System.Enum.GetValues(enumType);

DataTable dt = new DataTable();
dt.Columns.Add("key", typeof(string));
dt.Columns.Add("value", typeof(int));

int i = 0;
while (i < names.Length)
{
DataRow dr = dt.NewRow();
dr["key"] = names[i];
dr["value"] = (int)values.GetValue(i);
dt.Rows.Add(dr);
i++;
}

return dt;
}

Here is how you would use this function.

DataTable lo_dt = BindToEnum(typeof(Categories));
ddlCategory.DataSource = lo_dt;
ddlCategory.DataTextField = "key";
ddlCategory.DataValueField = "value";
ddlCategory.DataBind();

WebTrends Most Recent Search Engines Organic

While double checking how much organic traffic comes from search engines in WebTrends, I came across this in my reports (both in my Export to CSV and my WebTrends ODBC results.



I've blocked out my keywords to protect the innocent.

In this example the highlighted AltaVista visits sum up to 11 which is the same number of visits as the AltaVista total.

It's easy to filter this out. I recommend using just the Totals fields (in WebTrends ODBC this is (MostRecentSearchPhrase IS NULL).

So the lesson is to be careful when aggregating your data, otherwise you may be double counting your visits!