On the positive side, broad matching means that ads will run for variations of your keywords without the need to specify what all these variations might be. So in the example given in the adwords help file, the keyword web hosting might trigger ads for the search phrases web host or web hosting company.

However broad matching incorporates expanded matching so not only will ads show for variations in word order, and queries with additional words to the keywords, but ads will potentially show for synonyms and other related variations.

This might not be what you want and there may be times when the expanded matching can be much broader than you might expect. In a campaign I recently set up, a broad match on a generic product name triggered ads for search queries for a manufacturer name, very specific model numbers (not relevant to my client) and other products sold by the manufacturer.

There are two main ways to deal with it.

1. Build up a list of negative keywords and add them to the campaign

• use the keyword tools (particularly the adwords keyword tool as this will indicate potential expanded matches); extract the words that are not relevant and including them as negatives in the campaign
• run searches and seeing which words and phrases come up in the search listings and ads to uncover potential negatives
• analyse your website logs to extract non-relevant search queries or words that can be input as negatives
• run the new search query performance report to see which search queries triggered ads and what negatives are necessary in the campaign

2. Opt out of expanded match by using phrase and exact matching

By doing this you know when the ads will be triggered and you eliminate the instances of unwanted expanded matching.

Comments

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Seven Good PPC Habits Has One Surprise

The list Ellis published on Memorial Day may have been missed by some people, even though it is showing up on quite a few blogs.

He talks about controlling spending on campaigns by adjusting bid amounts instead of the daily budget, and the need to have a negative keyword list to eliminate customers who are likely to be non-converting.

Point number five may draw a lot of confused looks from search marketers:

5.- Avoid #1 Bottom line: The number one position is a bad ROI. Often times that can also be said about the #2 and #3 position. The traffic coming from the top positions are not buyers, they are just researching. Serious buyers WILL go to the 3, 4, 5 position. When the consumers are ready to buy, they will be back. Be patient.

Ellis doesn’t think the effort and expense to grab that top spot will payoff well for marketers. Sites like Google aren’t going to welcome that kind of thinking; what if people started settling for top five placement for ads instead of bidding hard for the top spot?

Add your thoughts below the article. Is it time to stop playing Google’s money game, as Ellis indirectly hinted?

Their reward for doing exactly that? Yahoo’s founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo, worth a combined $4.7 billion, dressed up in giant sumo suits and had a sumo wrestling match in the middle of Yahoo’s campus, as many of their employees watched and laughed.

They’re busy getting the photos together, but what I want to know is: Who won?

More photos here and here and here.

(via Search Engine Land)

Comments

Broad matching is the default option in that it requires no special formatting. There are advantages to using broad match but some disadvantages as well. 

Broad Match Pluses: 

• more impressions and more traffic
• a wider variety of keyword phrases can be targeted without having to add them all into the campaign
• can be used to find additional, popular keyword phrases if you examine the logs to find the full phrases

Broad Match Minuses:

• not as targeted – you can cover a wider range of searches with one broad match but you can’t make the ads as relevant to very targeted searchers
• expanded match can give unwanted matches
• poor targeting can result in a lower click through rate which will in turn result in a low quality score
• broad matching will not be delivered on all matches for new accounts with no quality score history

Strategies:

1. Use all 3 matching types to start with and then act on the information the results deliver.

- Use an analytics program such as Google analytics to discover additional keyword phrases from your broad matches. Add them as exact matches in a new ad group and improve the targeting.

- Delete keywords which don’t perform.

- Use different bids for each keyword matching option. Keep in mind that you may have to pay more for high converting, very targeted exact matches.

2. Use broad matching for longer phrases rather than single words. Where phrases overlap use separate ad groups and negative keywords to control which keyword phrase is matched. For example, if you have broad match keywords “web design” and “custom web design”, a search for “custom web design” could be matched with either phrase. Google will not necessarily select the most relevant phrase so if you want more control and better targeting then add a negative keyword for “custom” in the ad group containing “web design”.

Ad Group 1

web design

-custom

Ad Group 2

custom web design

3. Use dynamic keyword insertion to improve the targeting for broad matches

Comments

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Mattis wrote of matching choices, and how things Used To Be with Yahoo advertising. Ads were delivered Standard Match, high bid to low, followed by Advanced Match, high bid to low.

That’s been dropped with the arrival of Panama, Yahoo’s new ad placement system. Relevance matters, and the highest paying keyword bid may not be the one that grabs the top slot when ads are displayed:

This may increase the competition on certain keywords for both types of ads, and could cause some advertisers to pay higher click charges and receive more traffic volume

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-plays-the-match-game-with-sem-2007-02/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/a-webpros-guide-to-dating-sites-2007-02 http://www.webpronews.com/a-webpros-guide-to-dating-sites-2007-02#comments Wed, 14 Feb 2007 18:47:41 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=35197 Hitwise has told me the dating sites I would be frequenting.
]]> When I was 15, I successfully infiltrated a girls’ slumber party. In college, I took Interdisciplinary Approach to Dress at 8 am, and was, apparently, the only guy to think of it. Let’s just say that, early on, I had good grasp of the economic concept of scarcity. I’m not single these days, but if I were, Hitwise has told me the dating sites I would be frequenting.

Overall, gender profiles at dating sites are roughly even, being 51 percent male and 49 percent female. But for the young cad looking to improve his chances this Valentine’s Day, there are just a few that give him the full box of chocolates. Like a good marketer, though, he may have to narrow down his demographic.

Dating Sites With Best Female to Male Ratio

1. eHarmony.com: 3.5 to 1

2. LoveAccess.com: almost 9 to 1

3. LocalHookUpz.com: 3.5 to 1

4. SeniorPeopleMeet.com: 4 to 1 (providing death rates remain constant

5. Chemistry.com: 3.5 to 1

6. BBWDateFinder.com: almost 4 to 1 and gaining

7. CatholicMatch.com: 3.5 to 1 except on Sunday

8. LatinAmericanCupid.com: 3.5 to 1

9. DontDateHimGirl.com: 4 to 1 (and probably best if it stays that way)

10. SugarDaddie.com: 3.5 to 1

And if it’s girls he’s looking for, there’s more than one reason to stay away from sites that are predominantly visited by males. Not only is there a lack of females, but everybody else there is gay. There are a couple, though, he can visit if he’s looking for a foreign girl.

Top 10 Dating Sites With Worst Female to Male Ratio

1. Manhunt.net: 1 to 9

2. Adam4Adam.com: almost 1 to 9

3. Gay.com/personals: 1 to 9

4. WorldGayMen.com: 1 to 9

5. Globaladies.com: almost 1 to 9

6. Blossoms.com: almost 1 to 9

7. AnastasiaWeb.com: 1 to 9

8. FilipinaHeart.com: almost 1 to 9

9. LoveMe.com: almost 1 to 9

10. Gaydar.co.uk: almost 1 to 100

But for the Don Juan who likes competition and fishing from the largest pools, there are the traditional, popular options – the hip places on the Web where you’ll definitely have to bring you’re A-game.

Top 10 Dating Sites By Market Share

1. True.com: 56% Male

2. Singles.net: 51.5% Male

3. Personals.yahoo.com: 51.4% Male

4. PlentyofFish.com: 54.7% Male

5. Match.com: 45% Male

6. eHarmony.com: 31.% Male

7. BlackPeopleMeet.com: 43% Male

8. Mate1.com: 51% Male

9. ManHunt.net: 90% Male

10. Adam4Adam.com: 86% Male

There you have it, guys. You’re personal guide to Web dating, courtesy of Hitwise. Happy hunting.

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]]> http://www.webpronews.com/a-webpros-guide-to-dating-sites-2007-02/feed 2 http://www.webpronews.com/youtube-vs-gandhi-in-death-match-2007-01 http://www.webpronews.com/youtube-vs-gandhi-in-death-match-2007-01#comments Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:34:04 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=34449 A New York-based clown-turned-stand-up-comedian-slash-yoga-mime posted a video of himself on YouTube impersonating Gandhi doing a pole dance. Stop laughing. India doesn’t think it’s funny, and the government has threatened to take action against YouTube if the video isn’t removed.

The comedian is Gautham Prasad, whom you’d never heard of until India got its sari in a twist. He says he put the video on YouTube as a marketing tool. But a user-generated video site was no match for a national government in marketing power.

Since the Indian government read the riot act to local Indian TV stations for airing clips of the video, and threatened to block YouTube, the video has been viewed nearly 56,000 times and climbing.

The video has also spurred over 580 comments, most of which are arguing the finer points of Gandhi’s charmed life, whether he was a pedophile, or biased toward Hindus – you know, same stuff, different part of the Internet.

But Prasad, on his blog, says it’s not really him in the video wearing a thong diaper and gold stripper-tassels:

I am not playing Mahatma Gandhi, I am playing a CHARACTER who is playing Gandhiji. I am playing a fool who thinks it would be a good idea to dress up like Gandhi and do this dance. In reality, I’m making fun of myself.

It doesn’t matter if it’s Prasad in the video or just a guy that looks like Prasad looking like Gandhi, according to Indian officials. The video itself is an “assault on the dignity of the father of the nation,” and they are demanding a profound apology from the Indian TV channels that aired the video. In Gandhi’s hometown, university students disrupted a train with a Gandhi-style sit-in protest.

But the prize for loaded pro-Gandhi journalistic sentence formation (and, by default, anti-Prasad) goes to Khaleej Times, a news outlet that understands straight journalism about as much as India understands freedom of speech. I love the first two sentences, which are playing characters pretending to be AP Style sentences:

NEW DELHI – The Indian government has been angered by an offensive video clip on Mahatma Gandhi posted on the video-sharing internet site Youtube.com and was contemplating action against the website, news reports said Saturday.

The controversial video which shows a man dressed as Gandhi – apostle of non-violence and leader of India’s freedom movement – resorting to violence, carrying an automatic rifle, gyrating to music and doing a pole dance.

He said “gyrating.”

The rest of the story is so clich, you could have written it without any research whatsoever. Prasad says supporters of the pacifist icon “have threatened to stone me, hit me, or kill me. I don’t think Gandhiji would approve.”

A Google spokesperson said, “these issues are complicated as the Internet is an international phenomenon. While technology can bring great opportunity and access to information globally, it can also present new and unique cultural challenges.”

It also presents a great time to revisit Weird Al Yankovick’s classic movie, UHF, just for the Gandhi 2 trailer, which the Khaleej Times has confused with Prasad’s video.

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]]> http://www.webpronews.com/youtube-vs-gandhi-in-death-match-2007-01/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/introduction-to-regular-expressions-in-php-2006-06 http://www.webpronews.com/introduction-to-regular-expressions-in-php-2006-06#comments Mon, 19 Jun 2006 15:25:57 +0000 Bernard Peh http://www.webpronews.com/?p=29904 In Linux and Unix, the syntax that is commonly used by many applications for specifying text patterns is known as regular expressions or in short form – regex.

Regex is a very powerful technique to describe patterns and many programs use them to describe sequences of characters to be matched. Search programs such as ‘grep’ rely heavily on regex. Basically regex forms the core in the linux world. Many scripting languages such as perl, ruby, php…etc have built-in regex functions as well. So you can see, learning regular expression is important because they are used alot in many places and probably more so in the future.

Regex can be scary at first but if you can get the basics, it is really not too hard to understand. In this article, we are going to look at how regex comes into the picture when writing php applications.

To do a quick summary so far, a regular expression is a sequence of literal characters, wildcards, modifiers and anchors.

Literal Characters

Literal characters are letters, digits and special characters that match only themselves. Examples are abc, 123, ~@ and so on (some characters are reserved though).

- An inclusion range [m-n] matches one of any character included in the range from m to n. Example ‘[a-z]‘ will match any alpha character that falls within the a to z range.

- An exclusion range [^m-n] matches one of any character not included in the range from m to n. Example ‘[^0-9]‘ will match any non-digit character.

- A period “.” matches any character. It is also known as the wildcard. Example ‘a.c’ will match ‘aec’, ‘acc’, ‘a@a’ and so on.

- The escape character ” enables interpretation of special characters. Example ‘a.c’ will match ‘ac’ only. Remember that ‘.’ is a reserved character to represent a wildcard? Therefore to match a period, ie ‘.’, we need to escape it like so ‘.’

- The expression [:alnum:] will match all alpha-numeric characters. It is a shortcut to [A-Za-z0-9]. As you can see, it is not really a shortcut. The expression [:alnum:] might be easier to remember for some people.

- The expression [:alpha:] will match all alpha characters. It is a shortcut to [A-Za-z].

- The expression [:blank:] will match a space or tab.

- The expression [:digit:] will match a numeric digit. It is a shortcut to [0-9].

- The expression [:lower:] will match all lowercase letters. It is a shortcut to [a-z].

- The expression [:upper:] will match all uppercase letters. It is a shortcut to [A-Z].

- The expression [:punct:] will match all printable characters, excluding spaces and alphanumerics.

- The expression [:space:] will match a whitespace character.

Modifiers

A modifier alters the meaning of the immediately preceding pattern character.

- An asterisk (‘*’) matches 0 or more of the preceding term. Example ‘a*’ will match ”, ‘a’, ‘aa’, ‘aaaaa’ and so on (Note the use of ”. It simply means that the expression matches nothing as well).

- A question mark (‘?’) matches 0 or 1 of the preceding term. Example ‘a?’ will match ” and ‘a’ only.

- A plus sign (‘+’) matches 1 or more of the preceding term. Example ‘a+’ will match ‘a’, ‘aaaaaaa’ and so on. It will not match ”.

- {m,n} matches between m and n occurences of the preceding term. Example ‘a{1,3}’ will match ‘a’, ‘aa’ and ‘aaa’ only.

- {n} matches exactly n occurences of the preceding term. Example ‘a{2}’ will match ‘aa’ only.

Anchors

Anchors establish the context for the pattern such as “the beginning of a word” or “end of word”.

- The pike ‘^’ marks the beginning of a line. Example ‘^http’ will match any new line that starts with ‘http’.

- The dollar sign ‘$’ marks the end of a line. Example ‘after$’ will match any line that ends with ‘after’. (Variables in php starts with $. Try not to confuse with it).

Grouping

Grouping ‘( )’ allows modifiers to apply to groups of regex specifiers instead of only the immediately proceding specifier. Example ‘( aa | bb )’ will match either ‘aa’ or ‘bb’

Enough of the boring stuff, it is time to put what the theory of regex is into good use.

PHP Implementation

There are 2 main variants of regex, Perl-compatible regex (PCRE) and POSIX-Extended. PHP offers quite alot of functions to implement these 2 types of regex. In PHP, the most commonly used PCRE function is ‘preg_match’ and in POSIX-extended regex, ‘ereg’. Both syntax are slightly different but equally powerful. The preference to use ‘preg_match’ or ‘ereg’ is entirely up to individual although Zend suggested that preg_match is slightly faster. I prefer to use ‘eregi’ simply because of my background in linux administration.

Example 1: Matching United States 5 or 9 digit zip codes

Zip codes in the USA have the following format ##### or #####-#### where # is a digit. If you want to verify the zip code submitted say from an online form, you will need to use regex somewhere in your script to verify it. The matching POSIX-extended regex pattern will be:

[[:digit:]]{5}(-[[:digit:]]{4})?

Confused? Wait, let me explain why. This regex is split up into 2 parts: [[:digit:]]{5} and (-[[:digit:]]{4})?.

First Part: ‘[[:digit:]]’ means the digit range and {5} means that the digit must occur 5 times.

Second Part: The bracket ‘( )’ groups the ‘-[[:digit:]]{4}’ together and the ‘?’ means the expression ‘(-[[:digit:]]{4})’ can either occur 0 or 1 time.

To implement the regex in PHP, we use the following code:

$zipCodes = 'xxxxx-xxxx'; $pattern = '[[:digit:]]{5}(-[[:digit:]]{4})?'; if (ereg($pattern,$zipCodes)) { echo "matched found "; } else { echo "match not found"; }

Example 2: Matching Dates

Say we want to verify the dates entered by the user. If we only accept dates like “YYYY-MM-DD” or “YYYY-M-D”, the regex pattern will be

[0-9]{4}(-[0-9]{1,2})+

The ‘+’ behind the term (-[0-9]{1,2}) means that the term must occur at least once. Note that I can also rewrite the regex as:

[[:digit:]]{4}(-[[:digit:]]{1,2})+

or

[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{1,2}-[0-9]{1,2}

As you can see, there can be many solutions to a problem…

Conclusion

Regex may be hard to digest at first but the logic is simple if you are able to practice more. Learning regex is as important as learning PHP. More examples can be seen at web-developer.sitecritic.net. Good luck.

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Bernard Peh is a Web Developer based in Melbourne. He works with experienced web designers and developers everyday, designing and developing commercial websites. He specialises mainly in SEO and PHP programming. Visit his blog at Melbourne PHP

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/introduction-to-regular-expressions-in-php-2006-06/feed 9 http://www.webpronews.com/for-automated-sites-php-and-mysql-are-a-perfect-match-2005-09 http://www.webpronews.com/for-automated-sites-php-and-mysql-are-a-perfect-match-2005-09#comments Tue, 20 Sep 2005 16:48:15 +0000 Halstatt Pires http://www.webpronews.com/?p=23205 You’ve decided to automate your web site. Now what? Here are some ideas to help you choose how to automate your site.

A bit of programming is going to be necessary if you want to automate a site. There are many types of programs that can be used to automate a web site including JavaScript, PHP, Perl, ASP, Java and more. So, which do you use? For many, it is a personal choice.

I prefer PHP for programming. PHP is a particularly useful programming language because it allows for advanced programming and is easy to integrate with web pages. Another plus of PHP is that the language interfaces very well with MySQL, a popular type of online database.

Yet another plus of PHP is that it is Open Source Code. The actual code that is PHP is available to the public for free, while the source code for products such as ASP are not. Because PHP is open source, there is a large community of PHP programmers that help each other with code. This means PHP programmers can rely on each other by using reusable pieces of code called functions and classes rather than constantly reinventing the wheel. This can dramatically cut down on production time.

Overall, PHP is flexible, cheaper than many alternatives, and built around a community. PHP and MySQL are excellent choice for webmasters looking to automate their web sites.

What Can PHP and MySQL do for me? Just about anything you can think of. That is the beauty of custom programming. A few ideas of what you can do with a PHP and MySQL driven site include:

1. E-commerce

2. User Polls

3. Keyword Tracking

4. Set User Preferences

5. Manage Password Protected Member’s Areas

6. Lead Follow Up

7. Customer Relations

8. Content Management

9. Email Newsletters

10. Accounting

11. Invoicing

12. Scheduled Updates

The list is limited only by your imagination. Once you have decided to go with a PHP and MySQL site, you can either get a custom program created, use a prepackaged version or a combination of both. Many PHP and MySQL programs that come prepackaged are easy to customize and can save you a lot of time and money over starting from the ground up.

Halstatt Pires is an Internet marketing consultant with http://www.marketingtitan.com – an Internet marketing firm in San Diego offering automated web site systems through http://www.businesscreatorpro.com.

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