On Wednesday, July 15, Social Media Club Nashville will once again meet-up to discuss communication and technology.
This event’s focus will be on nonprofit. Panelist from several Nashville area communities and nonprofit agencies will open up on their strategies and hurdles with social media.
The panel consists of representatives from Cool People Care, Center for Nonprofit Management, Nashville Zoo, and the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee
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This Nashville nonprofit discussion will take place at Nonprofit Management in Metro Center, from 6pm – 8pm, on Wednesday July 15th This Social Media Club Nashville event is free to attend, however space is limited and reservations encouraged. Please RSVP to socialmediaclubnashville at gmail dot com |
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Social Media Club Nashville is part of an international network of community groups that host conversations that explore key issues facing our society as technologies transform the way we connect, communicate, collaborate and relate to each other.
Tags: Events, Nashville, smcnash, Social Media
Microsoft’s Bing is the latest so-called “Google Killer” to hit the Twitter trends buzz. There was also recent push at SMX Advanced that Chris Smith discusses on SemClubHouse.com. No doubt there is a strong marketing effort by Microsoft to get people talking about Bing. In that sense, it was, and is a successful marketing campaign. But will “buzz” be enough?
The Bing commercials follow two themes: “Search Overload” and “Decision Engine”. The problems with these themes are they seem to indicate that users are frustrated by Google and the overloading.
The search overload theory seems to imply that we are worse off because of Google. In fact, it’s just the opposite. I assume the theory is “Bing is better, because Google is broken“. The problem with that theory is that Google is not broken.
Lance Loveday, the CEO of Closed Loop Marketing, recently stated it well on SearchEngineLand.com:
“Trying to claim that search is somehow broken when most users are quite happy with it is also a non-starter. It’s just not going to resonate—especially once the ad campaign ends.” source: http://searchengineland.com/bing-a-google-killer-get-real-20510
True that Google does not always immediately take us to our answer, but that is the beauty of it. Because of that we have learned to “google” more often and queries are becoming more detailed. On our quest to find “the answer”, we discover new questions, new answers, and new queries.
“Googling” is about the journey. Although, none of us will admit we enjoy spending time on Google. I doubt it is on anyone’s hobby list. Well, except for mine, but I am in the geeky minority. However, I do see the traffic and the queries. We know Googling as a way of life now.
It is easy to announce a better “Decision Engine”. However, that assumes the user knows the question. “Googling” helps us define the question.
We query. We learn. We adjust. We query. The Googling cycle begins and we love it!
And we DO find our answer. We also learn how to ask a better question. We learn about other tidbits of knowledge related to that topic. We Google.
We could “Bing” if we do not know the answer. We Google when we don’t know the question.
Social Media Club Nashville hosts its first meeting on Tuesday, May 19th from 6pm to 8pm at Aloft Hotel in Cool Springs.
The goal of Social Media Clubs are to organize people and events for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media.
The event will consist of a panel discussion on social media within Nashville’s online community. The panel will include Ben Lehman, Web Marketer at Healthways; Jared Degnan, Interactive Marketing Consultant for Mars Petcare; Dave Delaney, Social Media Coordinator at Griffin Technology; and Eric Shuff, Social Media Coordinator for The Tennessean.
RSVP to this event at: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=77128557091
Tags: Events, Nashville, smcnash, Social Media
The next Hendersonville Geek Breakfast will this Thursday, May 14 at 7:30am. This event will be at Mimi’s Café. We would love for you to join us.
A Geek Breakfast is a monthly community-driven meeting for local (and visiting) technology-minded people. Each month attendees congregate over bacon, eggs and plenty of coffee to discuss topics like social media, digital marketing, design, programming, and ways to better their communities.
source: http://geekbreakfast.org
The Hendersonville Geek Breakfast is a “spin off” of the well established Nashville Geek Breakfast. Everyone is welcome.
RSVP: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=91703052789
Tags: Events, GeekBreakfast, Hendersonville, Nashville
Actually, it’s not even broad match anymore, it’s “Advanced Match”. The original broad match worked well. However, “Advanced Match” has declined in performance over the past several months.
A Brief Introduction
Google has four keyword matching options that can trigger a pay-per-click ad. Those match types are: Broad, Phrase, Exact, and Negative. For the purpose of this discussion, we will exclude negative match type. That is a totally different conversation, but still very essential for a well optimized campaign.
Per Google’s definition, below are the other 3 match types:
- Broad match: Allows your ad to show on similar phrases and relevant variations
- Phrase match: Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase
- Exact match: Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively
(Notice, there is not an actual “Advanced Match”. Broad Match IS Advanced Match, but not really it’s Broad Match. Just not the original Broad Match. Broad Match would be good if it was Broad Match, but Broad Match is really Advanced Match. I want to opt out of Advanced Match and keep Broad Match, the original Broad Match. … Ugh! See what I mean by headache? You have one too now, don’t you? )
Diana Adams helps you make sense of those 3 match types on SearchEngineGuide.com. It’s great reading to help anyone get started with the match types.
All three of above match types have their advantages and disadvantages. Broad matched traffic, for example, will not convert as well as exact matched. That is often because the ad and/or landing page is not tailored toward that targeted keyword. It may also perform poorly because the match may be too broad and irrelevant to the actual keyword.
Because of the ever-growing use of long-tailed search queries, exact match will never match all of the traffic that exists. Daily costs can quickly ski-rocket with broad match, because of the extensive queries that it matches. Thus, analytics must be closely observed to find out when it is appropriate to use broad, phrase or exact.
The Headache
At first, those match types seem simple, and at one time they were. However, over the past 8 months, Google has made some significant changes to broad match. Broad match has recently been “Expanded”. Those changes are causing an increase in spend and a decrease in conversion, which means many marketers may be shutting down broad match soon. Especially, if the broad match (Advanced Match) changes continue.
The problem with broad match being “too broad” has always existed, but those problems were able to be overcome with phrase matching, pausing and/or an extensive negative keyword list. It’s only recently that these matches have reached out of control.
One problem with the new “enhancement” is a broad match term competing against an exact match term. If a search query matches exactly, then the exact match keyword should be the keyword that Google matches. That would mean that the tracking tags, landing page, and ad type are the intended match.
Yes, that is ideal, but is that always what happens? Yes, if two keywords are active, and equal in bid, then the exact match “wins” our over broad match.
However, what happens if an exact match keyword is performing poorly and the keyword is paused? Because that keyword is poor, the last thing you would want is traffic on that keyword. However, because it’s paused it now becomes eligible for broad match. D’oh! That’s exactly why the keyword was paused to begin with. Thus, the headache continues.
The simple fix is for Google to count all exact matches, paused or not, as a match. That would basically treat a paused exact match keyword as a negative keyword. Currently, advertisers have to tweak minimum bids on keywords that SHOULD be paused. This allows the keywords to be active, but have a low enough bid that it costs very little. Of course, the bid can’t be too low, because then it becomes inactive. And the inactive means, it’s now eligible for Advanced Match … er, I mean broad match.
Rich discusses some improvements Google can do to prevent these headaches on distilled.co.uk
Another nice addition would be to add another optional match type: Advanced Match. Then, we can opt out of Advanced Match type and broad match will remain “broad”.
Ultimately, the broad match strategy by Google is causing advanced pay-per-click advertisers to go around and circles with their ads. Now, do you feel that throbbing directly between your eyes? It is called the “Broad Match Headache”.
Tags: broad match, Google, match type, Pay Per Click, PPC
