So if you have been reading my blog (yeah right) you might have read the entry about my successful attempt to do fullsite caching with my Mambo driven website. Because of the way I implemented this caching method, all unregistered users get the same page which ist very fast and therefor great most of the time. Now, I also use Google's Adsense program on my site which works, as you probably know, simply by including javascript code into your pages. One thing I like doing with Adsense is to serve their referal ads for Firefox or the Google Pack, but since the Google code does not check whether the user is already on Firefox, useless ads are served. Google also lacks a language testing routine, meaning that German users will get the English referal link or banner for either product. This means that these checks have to be done by us, the publishers. We need to identify the users' preferred language and the browser they're using. Using PHP that is pretty easy, however, my pages are cached and no longer dynamically served to most of my visitors!

So what to do?

Its a fairly simple trick: We do what Google does! We move our dynamic ad selection routine to a non cached PHP script and implement that via Javascript.

Let's say you want to serve German and English Firefox ads when a visitor uses Internet Explorer and Google Pack ads when he's already on Firefox.

Open a new PHP file and call it something like adsense.php. Of course your webserver needs to support PHP scripts.

First we have to identify the user's languages. This is easy, so start with

Now we're going to check for German and for non Firefox users and add the according Google code to an array, because that's the most straight forward way of doing it by copy and paste ;-)

Those were our German visitors. Lets just imagine that the rest will be OK with English ads. Of course (and that's what I have done) more language can be added. This is a very simple example. Let's add the English ads:

Note: Just for the joy of it we're going to serve Google Pack ads to IE users aswell. Using the array, we can simply add it to our stack of ads. That's why the Google Pack won't be in an else as it was for our German friends.

We could stop here. But why not throw in some normal 468x60 banners too? Just add it to the stack!

After that we'll pick one ad out of the stack at random which will then be served after being properly formatted to our Javascript needs.

Save and upload to your webserver.

Finally add the Javascript code to your static page like this:

That's it! You're done. Your static pages will now serve browser specific Google ads.