Digital #Marketing 101: This is Why Your Website is Not Converting by @Rocco_Zebra_Adv

Many companies today get frustrated when their digital marketing plans fail. Forums and LinkedIn conversations are filled with business owners trying to understand what’s wrong with their campaigns. Too often, people forget sales and conversions are just the tip of the iceberg in a long and complex system called the sales funnel.

This article will focus on explaining what makes a successful online marketing strategy and will hopefully help you increase the return on your marketing investment.

Is Your Online Marketing Strategy Well Planned Out?

Online marketing strategies serve as the engine of a business. They should generate qualified leads via your website, which means making a mistake can affect your long-term success.

Your online marketing strategy needs to include but won’t be limited to:

Targeted SEM campaignsEffective SMM strategiesWhite hat SEO techniquesTop notch email marketing campaignsRemarketing on Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc..

Once you have a good plan in place, don’t forget to create an optimization plan. It is extremely important to set up a system that allows you to tune up based on statistically relevant data.

What Are The Competitive Advantages of Your Business?

Finding out your competitive advantages doesn’t very long. By answering a few questions, you can determine what you have to offer that your competitors don’t. The most difficult part is identifying which competitive advantages will make the difference in the decision-making process of your potential customers.

Try to answer the following questions while looking for your competitive advantages:

What makes your business so unique?How does your service compare to your competitors? Where are you better than them (and vice-versa)?Why should customers contact you and not somebody else?How easy is to replicate your competitive advantage? Can competitors develop it easily?

Overall, a good competitive advantage is unique, difficult to imitate, and valuable to the customers. The more valuable and difficult to imitate it is, the more people will be willing to pay a premium price for your service.

How Effective is Your Website?

Many companies know their website could be improved, but figure it is good enough to generate leads. Most of the times, this is an excuse for a failed marketing plan. The real story is most marketing campaigns are harmed by bad websites.

This issue is very complex and both the website and the marketing can be a problem.

When it comes down to the website, you must ask the following questions:

Is our website reflecting the competitive advantage of our business in a proper and clear way?Is information easily accessible? Users love to find what they are looking for RIGHT AWAY.Is our website easy to navigate?Do our pages load fast enough?Are we constantly a/b testing the site for improvements?

Imagine your website as a store in a mall. You can have the best walk in traffic, but if you are failing to convert this qualified traffic, it is time to change the way you are selling your merchandise.

Common best practices include:

Making sure users understand who and what you are about in the first 10 second of the navigation. You will improve your bounce rate and increase engagement on your site.Test each step in the process to obtain a sale or a lead. In case of a lead generation site, you have to test the content and layout of the landing page. In case of a sales oriented site, you need to test several parts of the funnel (landing page, order page, and any other additional page).Connecting your website to all of your social media to add credibility and a personal touch to the website.Is Data Affecting Your Decisions?

Data is a gold mine. The more data you have about your website and marketing activities the better off you are. How can you use your data to improve performance? First, find out what sort of data is relevant to your business and move forward from there.

Generally, the most useful data is:

Where are your sales are coming from? Are you generating sales via mobile or desktop? Is there any referral site generating a good amount of conversions?Segment data by gender, age, location, device and source and learn what’s most profitable. You can also use this information to run highly segmented remarketing campaignsIdentify marketing campaigns with low time on page and high bounce rate and optimize them.Test to find out how a website change affects the performance of your website.

The more you test the more you will learn. Take advantage of data.

How Does it All Play Together?

All of the steps I just discussed contribute to creating a successful website. Here is a graph connecting the dots for us:

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Pinterest Introduces A New Analytics Platform For Business Users by @mattsouthern

Pinterest often hears from businesses who change their product and marketing strategies based on insights learned on the platform, the company stated in an announcement.

In an effort to continue to help businesses improve how they work, Pinterest has introduced a new analytics platform. The new analytics platform is said to be smarter, and capable of providing meaningful insights about what your customers are interested in.

A few of the key features of Pinterest’s new analytics platform include:

Traffic and engagement metrics: See what people interact with most from your Pinterest profile and website, and how much traffic your site gets when you add the Pin It button.Audience insights: Insight into the people who engage with your business and what else they’re into.Advice for driving further engagement: Based on how people engage with your content, Pinterest will provide advice on how to increase impressions, clicks and repins.

We’ve gotten lots of great feedback about our analytics tool, and we hope this new version helps you improve how you do business—whether it’s updating your product offerings after seeing what’s popular on Pinterest, or changing how you pin based on what’s trending with Pinners.

To get started with Pinterest’s new analytics platform first make sure you have a business account. Then go to analytics.pinterest.com to see the new analytics. For further information, check out Pinterest’s Help Center.

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Twitter Opens Up Its Analytics Dashboard To All Users by @mattsouthern

It has been a good news day if you love social media analytics. First, Pinterest introduces a new analytics platform, and now Twitter opens up its analytics dashboard to everyone.

Last month Twitter launched an analytics dashboard that was akin to having Google Analytics for Twitter. It did everything you would want in a Twitter analytics tool, such as measure the performance of all your tweets, track how many people viewed your tweets and clicked on your links and so on.

Except there was one problem, only advertisers and verified users had access to it.

That has all changed now, as Twitter engineer Ian Chan broke the news in a tweet that the analytics dashboard is open to everyone:

Absolutely thrilled to open up access to http://t.co/wcU6oj9hFM to EVERYONE. Check it out, and let us know what you think!

— Ian Chan (

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Sitemaps Best Practices Including Large Web Sites

Fabrice CanelAugust 28, 2014August 8, 2014426shares4CommentsOne of the key Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies for web sites is to have high quality sitemaps helping search engines to discover and access all relevant content posted on that web site. Sitemaps offer this really simple way for site owners to share information with every search engine about the content they have on their site instead of having to rely solely on crawling algorithms (ie: crawlers, robots) to find it.

The Sitemaps protocol defined at www.sitemaps.org, is a now widely supported. Often web sites and some Content Management Systems (CMSs) offers sitemaps by default or as an option. Bing even offers an open source server-side technology, Bing XML Sitemap Plugin, for websites running on Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows® Server, as well as Apache HTTP Server.

Best Practices if You Want to Enable SitemapsIf you don’t have a sitemap yet, we recommend first that you explore if your web site or your CMS can manage this, or install a sitemap plugin.

If you have to, or want to, develop your own sitemaps, we suggest the following best practices:

First, follow the sitemaps reference at www.sitemaps.org. Common mistakes we see are people thinking that HTML Sitemaps are sitemaps, malformed XML Sitemaps, XML Sitemaps too large (max 50,000 links and up to 10 megabytes uncompressed) and links in sitemaps not correctly encoded.Have relevant sitemaps linking to the most relevant content on your sites. Avoid duplicate links and dead links: a best practice is to generate sitemaps at least once a day, to minimize the number of broken links in sitemaps.Select the right format:Use RSS feed, to list real-time all new and updated content posted on your site, during the last 24 hours. Avoid listing only the past 10 newest links on your site, search engines may not visit RSS as often as you want and may miss new URLs. (This can also be submitted inside Bing Webmaster Tools as a Sitemap option.)Use XML Sitemap files and sitemaps index file to generate a complete snapshot of all relevant URLs on your site daily.Consolidate sitemaps: Avoid too many XML Sitemaps per site and avoid too many RSS feeds: Ideally, have only one sitemap index file listing all relevant sitemap files and sitemap index files, and only one RSS listing the latest content on your site.Use sitemap properties and RSS properties as appropriate.Tell search engines where our sitemaps XML URLs and RSS URLs are located by referencing them in your robots.txt files or by publishing the location of your sitemaps in search engines’ Webmaster Tools.Scaling Up Sitemaps to Very Large SitesInterestingly some sites these days, are large… really large… with millions to billions of URLs. Sitemap index files or sitemap files can link up to 50,000 links, so with one sitemap index file, you can list 50,000 x 50,000 links

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Google To Stop Showing Authorship Information In Search Results by @mattsouthern

Last month we reported that Google would be removing Authorship pictures from search results. Now it has been confirmed by Google’s John Mueller that Authorship information will be removed from search results entirely.

The decision was made to drop Authorship information because the information was not found to be overly useful to searchers, and at times has even detracted from the search results.

Unfortunately, we’ve also observed that this information isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped, and can even distract from those results. With this in mind, we’ve made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results.

While it’s unfortunate to see Authorship information going away, it really should not make a difference to site owners. Since Authorship didn’t help to increase traffic to pages, then site owners shouldn’t notice a decrease in traffic going forward.

Something Mueller notes that Google will continue to focus on is Schema.org structured markup: “This markup helps all search engines better understand the content and context of pages on the web, and we’ll continue to use it to show rich snippets in search results.”

Google first started implementing Authorship around the time as the launch of Google

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Google’s Search App Is Now Truly Multilingual

See Amit's Top 10Google Made 890 Search Improvements In Last Year#GoogleFailWhat Happens When Knowledge Graph Goes BadSubscribe to SearchCapSUBSCRIBENewsSEOSEMLocalRetailSearch EnginesSocialHomeMobileGoogle’s Search App Is Now Truly MultilingualUsers can select up to five languages for simultaneous recognition.Greg Sterling on August 21, 2014 at 4:29 pm More

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Sponsored Message: The Future of Link Building

"title":"Google DMCA Notices Reach Record High With 7.8 Million Link Removal Requests Filed In One Week","img":"http:

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25 Great Free SEO Tools for On-Page Optimization by @navneetkaushal

In a world of Panda and Hummingbird, it is getting more and more important to get your on-page SEO right. You might have a fantastic outreach, a great PR campaign, and link profile, but if you don’t optimize your site, you will have a hard time landing top positions in the search results. To help you do it, I have compiled a list of top 25 free tools that can help you with on-page optimization.

Keyword Research1. Google AdWords Keyword Planner:

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Google Acquires Gecko Design, Designers Of The Original Fitbit by @mattsouthern

TechCruch reports that Google has acquired Gecko Design, the firm responsible for the mechanical design of the original version of the fitness tracking device Fitbit.

Gecko Design was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Los Gatos, California. Google reportedly acquired them to help with its Google X special projects laboratory. In addition to working for Fitbit, Gecko Design has also worked with high-profile clients such as Aliph (Jawbone), Dell, HP, Slingmedia, and OLPC.

Here is what the President of Gecko Design had to say about the acquisition in a statement posted on their home page:

This is an incredible opportunity for everyone at Gecko. We are very excited and honored to join Google(x) and work on a variety of cutting edge projects.

We have enjoyed working with all our clients. Words cannot express the level of appreciate we have for your support throughout the many years that Gecko’s doors have been open.

Google X has spawned some of Google’s most ambitious projects, such as Google Glass and its driverless car program. With Gecko Design on board, Google now has the product design talent to help bring life to new hardware.

Rumors have alleged that Google has been shopping around for Jawbone or other wearable device makers, but it appears that Google has instead opted to acquire a design partner used by these startups.

Google has yet to release any details regarding their deal with Gecko Design.

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Google Webmaster Tools Just Got a Lot More Important for Link Discovery and Cleanup

August 20th, 2014 - Posted by Robert Fisher to Advanced SEO

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community.
The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

What if you owned a paid directory site and every day you received emails upon emails stating that someone wants links removed. As they stacked up in your inbox, whether they were pleasant or they were sternly demanding you cease and desist, would you just want to give up? What would you do to stop the barrage of emails if you thought the requests were just too overwhelming? How could you make it all go away, or at least the majority of it?

First, a bit of background

We had a new, important client come aboard on April 1, 2013 with a lot of work needed going forward. They had been losing rankings for some time and wanted help. With new clients, we want as much baseline data as possible so that we can measure progress going forward, so we do a lot of monitoring. On April 17th, one of our team members noticed something quite interesting. Using Ahrefs for link tracking, we saw there was a big spike in the number of external links coming to our new client's site. 

When the client came on board on two weeks prior, the site had about 5,500 links coming in and many of those were less than quality. Likely half or more were comment links from sites with no relevance to the client and they used the domain as the anchor text. Now, overnight they were at 6,100 links and the next day even more. Each day the links kept increasing. We saw they were coming from a paid directory called Netwerker.com. Within a month to six weeks, they were at over 30,000 new links from that site.

We sent a couple of emails asking that they please stop the linking, and we watched Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) every day like hawks waiting for the first link from Netwerker to show. The emails got no response, but in late May we saw the first links from there show up in GWT and we submitted a domain disavow immediately.

We launched their new site in late June and watched as they climbed in the rankings; that is a great feeling. Because the site was rising in the rankings rather well, we assumed the disavow tool had worked on Netwerker. Unfortunately, there was a cloud on the horizon concerning all of the link building that had been done for the client prior to our engagement. October arrived with a Penguin attack (Penguin 2.1, Oct. 4, 2013) and they fell considerably in the SERPs. I mean, they disappeared for many of the best terms they had again began to rank for. They had fallen to page five or deeper for key terms. (NOTE: This was all algorithmic and they had no manual penalty.)

While telling the client that their new drop was a Penguin issue related to the October Penguin update (and the large ratio of really bad links), we also looked for anything else that would cause the issue or might be affecting the results. We are constantly monitoring and changing things with our clients. As a result, there are times we do not make a good change and we have to move things back. (We always tell the client if we have caused a negative impact on their rankings, etc. This is one of the most important things we ever do in building trust over time and we have never lost a client because we made a mistake.) We went through everything thoroughly and eliminated any other potential causative factors. At every turn there was a Penguin staring back at us!

When we had launched the new site in late June 2013, we had seen them rise back to page one for key terms in a competitive vertical. Now, they were missing for the majority of their most important terms. In mid-March of 2014, nearly a year after engagement, they agreed to do a severe link clean up and we began immediately. There would be roughly 45,000

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Is that Mind-Blowing Title Blowing Your Credibility? You Decide

Image of Tantalus courtesy of Clayton Cusak

What if I told you I could teach you to write the perfect headline? One that is so irresistible every person who sees it will click on it. You'd sign up immediately and maybe even promise me your firstborn.

But what if I then told you not one single person out of all the millions who will click on that headline will convert? And that you might lose all your credibility in the process. Would all the traffic generated by that "perfect" headline be worth it?

Help us solve a dispute

It isn't really that bad, but with all the emphasis lately on headline science and the curiosity gap, Trevor (your faithful editor) and I (a recovering copywriter) started talking about the importance of headlines and what their role should be in regards to content. I'm for clickability (as long as there is strong content to back the headline) and, if he has to choose, Trevor is for credibility (with an equal emphasis on quality of the eventual content).

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Why Your Facebook Campaign Doesn’t Work (And What You Can Do to Fix It) by @adamlundquist

Facebook is the future of Internet advertising. Or so you might have heard.

While it seems that everyone else’s ads are generating revenue, your ads sit there on the side of the page—unclicked like an ignored friend request from that person you barely even knew from high school.

What is going on with your Facebook campaign? Your ads go unnoticed, people bounce off of your landing page, and your value proposition seems to offer no value.

You wonder: Do companies actually make money with Facebook ads? Is this all a lie?

As you read case studies about success with Facebook ads, you may want to drag Mark Zuckerberg by the hoodie to your office and show him what exactly is going on with your particular campaign: The ROI is not case study worthy, in fact your ROI isn’t even positive.

If this sounds like you, then you are missing a vital link about how advertising on Facebook works. Here are the most common reasons why your Facebook campaign is failing.

You are Advertising on Facebook Like it’s a Search Engine

As someone who reads Search Engine Journal, you probably know how to make Internet advertising produce the business results you want on Google AdWords. AdWords has been around since 2000, so you have had some time to experiment with the system and learn how to use it effectively for your specific business model. You know about keeping your ad Groups tight, using negative keywords, and sending users to the right landing page.

However, when you take what you learned from AdWords and try applying it on Facebook the results are disappointing. This is because you are trying to advertise on Facebook like it is a search engine, while your potential customers are using Facebook like the social network it is.

Facebook Users Browse While Google Users Search With a Goal in Mind

People use social channels like Facebook with different intent than they use search engine channels like Google. 

You need to match the intent of the channel with your advertising campaign’s strategy.

When users search on Google they have a specific intent in mind, which often boils down to knowing, going, or doing. Each one of these intents is a type of question which requires a specific answer:

Knowing looks for more information on a product, service, or person.Going looks for a destination (like typing in Search Engine Journal into the search bar).Doing looks for a place to make a transaction or other conversion.

If everything works as it should, Google is there to provide the link to the exact answer the user is looking for. Your ad on Google should be as relevant to that specific intent as possible. In fact, when you get down to it, Google’s whole ad system is based on relevancy to your specific query, Google just calls it a quality score.

If you read Google’s own help section it states:

“having a high quality score means that our system thinks that your ad and landing page are relevant.”

The following is an example of a Google AdWords campaign that answers my specific query intent well. Let’s say I am your average customer and I am performing a doing search looking to buy a Celtics jersey:

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How to Use Facebook for Targeted Content Promotion

August 18th, 2014 - Posted by Paddy Moogan to Content, Social Media and Paid Search Marketing (PPC)

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

As much as content and advertising agencies would like you to believe it, content produced by a business doesn't just go viral on it's own. There is often something that pushes it really, really hard when it first goes live which gains momentum, and eventually the content is spread far and wide enough that it doesn't need you to push it anymore. Those of you who have read Good to Great may be making associations with the flywheel principle, but that's a post for another day!

In this post I want to talk about one of the ways you can give your content a nudge in the right direction and get more people looking at it: Facebook advertising.

I won't go into too much detail on the basics of Facebook advertising; there are lots of resources and posts out there which do this. Instead, I want to dive straight into the methods you can use to promote your content to an audience on Facebook.

One of the advantages of using Facebook is the fine level of detail you can go to in terms of targeting an audience. In my opinion, this is one of the areas where Facebook is actually better than Google when it comes to advertising. They have so many options when it comes to targeting your audience:

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How to Build Your Own Free Amazon Organic Search Rank Tracker

August 19th, 2014 - Posted by Nathan Grimm to Analytics, Tools and E-Commerce

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Do you want a free tool that tracks your organic search rankings in Amazon? Yes? You're in luck.

I am going to show you how to build your own organic search rank tracking tool using Kimono Labs and Excel.

This is a follow-up to my last post about how to rank well in Amazon, which covered the basic inputs to Amazon's ranking algorithm. It received a lot of comments about my rank-tracking prototype in Google Docs; the Moz community is overflowing with smart people who immediately saw the need for a tool to track their progress. As luck would have it, something in Google Sheets broke the day after I published, so I had to replicate the rank tracking tool in Excel using the SEOTools for Excel plugin. The Excel tool is a low-setup way to record your progress, but if you want to track more than a few terms, it is very laborious. I've since built a more (but not completely) automated, scalable way to track rankings using Kimono Labs to scrape the data and Excel to run the reports.

(Shout out to Benjamin Spiegel for turning me on to Kimono Labs through an excellent Moz post.)

Pros and cons of rank tracking

The death of Google rank tracking has been widely reported, so I feel compelled to review why Amazon rank tracking is both useful and a terrible KPI.

Amazon rank tracking is great because

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How to Improve Your Local SEO: An Interview With Greg Gifford by @johnrampton

As part of our SEJ interview series, I recently caught up with Greg Gifford of AutoRevo to discuss local SEO.

In the video below, Greg explains some things local SEOs are doing wrong and how they could be doing better.

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3 Super-Actionable Keyword Research Tips to Try Right Now by @egabbert

Larry Kim and Will Critchlow from Distilled recently did a great webinar revealing all their personal keyword research strategies. It went pretty in-depth, so if you’re in the mood for digging in, scroll to the bottom to see the slides and video.

Today, I just want to share three quick tips inspired by the webinar. If you’re looking to accomplish something beyond just dumping a seed term into a keyword tool, these clever tricks should jump-start your next keyword research session.

#1: Spark Content Ideas With Google Suggest Wild Cards

In the webinar, Will mentions picking this tip up from Tom Anthony at Distilled. You’ve probably used Google Suggest as a means of keyword research before, but I love this trick because it allows you to mine suggestions that don’t just come at the end of the phrase you’re typing.

Here’s what I mean: normally, when you start typing a search query, Google offers suggestions to complete the phrase:

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4 Ways Social Media is Utilized for Social Good by @kristelcuenta

Over the last few years, social media has had a huge impact in our everyday lives. It has completely changed the way we engage the world, both locally and internationally.

However, much of what is showcased focuses on the negative aspects of social media, such as people using it as a place to vent or rant or as place for cyberbullying. Despite our nature to focus on the more negative moments in social media, there are still many people using social media outlets to do great things in our world.

From the nonprofit, for-profit, and even ordinary individuals, here are four examples of how social media is being utilized for social good. 

Groups For Revolutionary Action

In 2011, social media played a very significant role during the Arab Spring revolutions in Egypt, where people came together and found support in their common desire for change. After 18 days of protest, the president of Egypt, who was disfavored for rising commodity prices and suppressing freedom and media, gave up his long-time presidency.

Social media sped up the process by helping organize the revolution’s efforts.  Facebook in particular played an important role by helping pro-democrats to organize protests. One example is a Facebook community ran by activist Whel Ghonim, who delivered protest messages through Facebook updates, images, photos, and even through Facebook notes. The community has grown to more than 1 million followers to date. 

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A 1,000 Word Post vs. A 2,000 Word Post: Which Has Better ROI? by @searchlabs

The argument over long-form content and short-form content is one which has been debated from behind keyboards since the advent of the Internet, and one which will doubtless carry on for the foreseeable future.

How Do You Measure ROI on Content?

There is no definitive method of measuring ROI on content, as each company/brand/site will be looking for something different. Whether you’re writing to bring more people to the site, increase conversions, establish credibility in your sector, or are just writing because you enjoy it, you’ll measure ROI differently.

There are often long lead times on seeing a direct conversion from content marketing (except perhaps in the retail and fashion sectors where this is probably less true) but there are some easier short-term ways to measure ROI if direct sales are not forthcoming. To measure ROI, consider using the following:

Organic search positions and SERP visibility (and backlink analysis)Traffic to siteTime spent on site and/or bounce rateSocial shares and engagement metrics

Now, let’s take a deeper look at each of these metrics and consider when using them to measure ROI would be most appropriate.

Organic Search Position

Getting higher positions in the SERPs will benefit any company, and having high-quality content is the best way to do this. It’s no secret that Google prefers content that answers a question, and will rank this content higher. A higher search position will inevitably have an impact on your online ROI (as long as it’s for a relevant key phrase). That is why many people engage in content marketing and why SEO, online PR, and content marketing are essentially one and the same in 2014.

Good visibility in the SERPs will get your site in front of more new users and increases your opportunity to increase ROI from content. Publishing two posts means you have the opportunity to rank for more terms, but only if these are relevant, worth reading, and good quality.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean they will rank well long-term. In a study conducted by SerpIQ, blog post pages with over 2,000 words ranked higher than shorter blog posts, which makes sense. If you’re looking for an answer to a question, it’s likely a 500-word post may not have enough useful phrases users are searching for.

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Conversational Search Comes To Bing by @mattsouthern

Bing recently announced they are now offer conversational search, and it works very much the same way as Google’s conversational search. You can ask a natural language question, and then follow up with another question about the same subject and Bing will remember what you were asking about.

Here’s an example of me testing out Bing’s new search functions by asking it questions about Google.

First question: “who are the founders of Google?”

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Google Ends Exact and Phrase Keyword Match Ability in AdWords; Now Applying Close Variant Keyword Matching by @mattsouthern

At least 7% of Google searches contain a misspelling, according to a new post on Google’s Inside AdWords blog. However, people still want to find what they’re looking for even if they haven’t spelled it correctly.

That’s why Google has announced that they’re applying close variant keyword matching to all exact and phrase match keywords starting in September.

Close variant keyword matching is an intuitive way to return the correct results that users are searching for. It was introduced in 2012, and Google says advertisers have seen strong results. “Advertisers are receiving an average of 7% more exact and phrase match clicks with comparable clickthrough and conversion rates.”

These incremental increases in clicks help advertisers seize opportunities to convert customers that are otherwise missed by “Low search volume” keywords that are common for misspellings and abbreviations.

Google’s announcement contains testimonials from three advertisers. Here’s one from Stitch America:

“In matching common stemming variants such as “custom hats” for “customized hats”, we’ve seen five times as many clicks for exact and phrase match keywords. What’s more impressive is that this additional traffic costs half as much.”

Close variant matching was already the default setting for campaigns, which means most advertisers won’t see a change in keyword matching behavior. The option to disable close variants will be removed in September.

Advertisers will no longer be able to build extensive lists of misspelled, abbreviated, and other close variations of your keywords. Instead, Google recommends to focus on adding negative keywords–including close variants you don’t want to match for–to shape traffic and reduce cost.

In addition to improving your campaigns’ ROI with an improved click-through rate and lower cost per click, with this update Google also wants to help deliver a better ad experience for your customers.

To learn more about keyword matching options, please see Google’s Help Center article.

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