Month: November 2011

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Is a Facebook “Like” Worth Anything Anymore?

Facebook has slowly dismantled the things that have made Facebook Business Pages a great resource for a business to have. In September and October Facebook has disabled these features.

No longer can you use these two important items on Facebook if you are a business:

  • Cannot send out a note to all your fans using the Facebook message system
  • Cannot have a forum like exchange on the discussion tab – discussions are removed too
  • Did away with the Facebook reviews tab
  • Serious changes to contest and “like” building strategies – many things are now off limits

Some of these features went away as of September 30th and others on October 31st, and I have to tell you I think more changes are in store.

Additionally, fans now can block all your updates from their pages. In fact, unless they subscribe to your updates on their wall they may actually never see what you have talked about or shared through default Facebook settings.

For businesses these very important changes have removed the value of a “like” on Facebook. Additionally, Facebook is now allowing anyone, not just fans, to post on your business wall. So now someone doesn’t even need to “like” your business to have their comments posted as it was before.

You may still force people to “like” your page with a fan gate for the time being, but this will probably change as well. In conclusion, before a “like” really had value – you could additionally market fans with coupon codes and messages all within Facebook; building relevancy and a reason for someone to actually “like” your business. With the changes that are being rolled out it sure seems like the value of a Facebook “like” has lost its value.

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AdWords Broad Match Modifier Explained

I am loving the Google AdWords broad match modifier! If you aren’t using it yet in your AdWords account this blog post will help you to know why you should and get you going fast.

First, this is what Google AdWords says about broad match modifiers:

“The broad match modifier is an AdWords targeting feature that lets you create keywords which have greater reach than phrase match, and more control than broad match. Adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign can help you get more clicks and conversions at an attractive ROI, especially if you mainly use exact and phrase match keywords today.”

Here’s a link to the full information in the AdWords help center on broad match modifiers to help you understand them better.

For accounts that are getting too many impressions and a low click through rate use of broad match modifiers will better target your AdWords program and get a better result as well as improve your CTR. For accounts that have low impressions, as you are only using phrase match and exact match keywords, broad match modifiers will open up a whole new set of possibilities that can really generate some sales action for your account and increase targeted impressions.

Here’s how you use them. Suppose your keywords are built around booking vacations to Hawaii. In your AdWords account you may have a list of keywords like this:

Hawaii vacations
“Hawaii vacations”
Hawaii travel agent
“Hawaii travel agent”
hotels in Hawaii

With the broad match keywords you may be getting lots of “looky-lous” and clicks on even keywords like rentals or hostels in Hawaii. Or you may not be getting enough action or having to pay too high a price per click.

Here’s what a few broad match modifiers may look like for these keywords:

Hawaii +travel +agent
Hawaii +hotel +reserve
vacation +Hawaii +reservation
hotels +Hawaii +book

For me, I take the most important word in the phrase and put that first then I put a space and then a + (without a space) in front of the keywords that I am requiring for Google to have in the users search query to see my ad. With this approach you can get a lot more traffic that is targeted to keywords you consider important.

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Even Google Itself Says Turn Off AdSense for Mobile

I have been working with the agency team at Google.com in the AdWords division. It seems that we got recognized not for being a Google AdWords Certified Partner, or for being a Google Engage for Agencies Member, but for managing so many accounts with a big ad spend. Yeah, maybe Google will send me a “token” Christmas present again this year.

Really kidding aside, I did want to share one very important point that Suzanne L. at the Google AdWords Agency shared with me.

“We recommend turning off AdSense for mobile in your content campaign. Our customers have found that the conversion rate is very low.”

Interesting! We don’t have too many clients advertising in content, but we do have a few. Of one that she and I looked at together a full one half of the clicks was being delivered in the mobile network. So, take it from the mouth of Google, turn off AdSense for Mobile if you are in the content network; save yourself some cash.