AdWords & Marketing News & Ranting, from Bryan Todd

Quick: Does your AdWords keyword list include negative exact-match keywords?

How about negative phrase match?

If you don't have those, you should. This rarely gets talked about, but all 3 matching options are available in negative form as well. And you should take advantage of them.

In your negative keyword list it would look like this:

-digital voice recorders
-[digital voice recorders]
-"digital voice recorders"

In certain cases the negative exact-match could be all you need. If for example you know that broad-match and phrase-match searches on 'digital voice recorders' yield good sales but for whatever odd reason the exact-match searches always yield clicks without sales, you can add that in as a negative keyword by itself and filter out only the people who type in that exact phrase.

Negative phrase match is useful if there's a specific two-or-more-word combination that, for example, you happen to know is a sure sign of a tire-kicker, no matter what the larger keyword phrase it happens to be part of.

Glenn Livingston on our recent Experts Series call had another good suggestion too: any time you pull an exact match out of one ad group and stick it into another, be sure and add the exact keyword into the old ad group as a negative. That way you're guaranteed that the old ad group's ads will never, ever get triggered for that exact phrase. If you don't do this, that keyword might still get picked up by broad or phrase match.

And I'm almost certain that as far as negative keywords go you're doing about 5-10% of what you could be doing. There's a ton of money to be saved and higher conversion rates to be had by getting the entire negative keyword strategy fine tuned in your account. That's why the guys from Epiar are doing a special Experts Series Teleseminar with Perry and me on Monday night, November 24th at 7:00 p.m. U.S. Central time.

Click here to sign up. I hope to see you there. It'll blow your mind.

They've Made the Jazz Purists Mad

My favorite radio station got violated this last week. Violated!

For two years now I've been a loyal and devoted listener of PureJazz 72 on SIRIUS Satellite Radio. I bought the unit back in November of 2006 because I wanted to be able to listen live to the OSU-Michigan game during a long drive from Chicago to Nebraska. And in addition to the game programming I instantly discovered that PureJazz 72 had better sound quality than any of the other channels (the rest of SIRIUS sounds like a cassette tape copy of a cassette tape copy of a sh*tty MP3).

And they had absolutely brilliant DJs.

My favorite by far was and continues to be Les Davis, the weeknight guy. Now here's a guy with class. Never drops a misspoken word, has a smooth and grandfatherly voice, delivers brilliant and fascinating knowledge from the jazz world. Including the common small tidbits, such as that Dexter Gordon was known as "LTD" - Long Tall Dexter - and that David "Fathead" Newman always hated being called "Fathead."

A week of listening to the Les Davis show was like a whole semester of History of Jazz 101 at the university.

There are two major players in the satellite radio world. If you've gone shopping for new cars recently, then you're probably well aware of this: there's SIRIUS and there's XM. Some auto manufacturers install XM in their vehicles, others SIRIUS.

Not a fun choice to have to make. If you want to buy an Acura but you don't want to be stuck with the satellite radio plan that goes with it, your hands are tied.

So the two companies merged, but their programming stayed separate, until this last week.

As a subscriber I both anticipated that and dreaded it. XM had far less crappy sound quality. That's a good thing. But I also knew that somebody was going to mess around with my Pure Jazz channel.

Don't ever mess with jazz purists.

Who are jazz purists? The guys that go ape over classic jazz, and classic jazz only. The sax guys, the vibes guys, the upright bass guys, the piano guys, the guitar guys - the ones who frequent smoky clubs and go for hard core bebop and are skeptical of anyone newer than 40 years old: The belief among the loyalists is, every modern artist is a smooth/pop wannabe sellout until proven otherwise.

It's a community with hardline identity, in a fortress with high walls and a deep and dangerous moat around it.

It's the jazz purists who live to worship the prints left by the feet of John Coltrane, Miles Davis (didn't he apostatize late in life?), Wes Montgomery, Art Blakey, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Lionel Hampton, Johnny Hartman, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Art Tatum and so many others.

They were the pantheon of true jazz, of pure jazz.

I'm not a jazz musician myself, and I can only watch and appreciate that level purism from a distance. But there is an identity there, that never gets violated.

The worst thing you can do is confuse classic jazz with smooth jazz. Kenny G is a swear word in that world, the equivalent of a racial insult. When someone tells you he's a classic jazz fan, don't ever get caught saying, "Jazz? Yeah, I just love Kenny G!" That will end the conversation and you will never be spoken to again. That's up there with "You're from Wales? Wow, I love Irish music!" or "You're from New Zealand? I just LOVE kangaroos and koala bears!" or "You're from China? Wow, I just LOVED 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'!"

(I'll explain that last one some other time.)

As a group with a collective identity, jazz musicians in jazz-musician mode are deeply distrusting of commercialism. That's why you never hear advertising on a classic jazz satellite channel. And if you're looking for pure jazz on regular broadcast radio you're in for serious frustration: the only classical jazz station in Los Angeles, for example, is a low-wattage public station down in Long Beach, KLON-FM.

I asked Perry about this once: Why isn't there a huge radio market for something so clasically American? He glibly smiled and remarked, "That's because jazz fans just don't buy things."

This is highly instructive. Jazz musicians buy stuff, of course. But as jazz musicians they are not commercial thinkers. You can sell armfuls of stuff to a jazz musician, but you're in for an uphill battle if you try to market and sell to him as a jazz lover. (Music or instruments or accessories notwithstanding.)

It's just like this curious fact: a major percentage of men who buy male enhancement and potency products happen to be college professors. For reasons of insecurity or God knows what else. But it's true.

But your marketing efforts will fall flat if you try to sell your male enhancement product to the college professors as college professors looking for male enhancement. Picture a sales page that opens up with "Discover the Amazing Potency Formula that Has University Professors from Coast to Coast Absolutely Raving!"

Not gonna happen.

There's a chip on the jazz purist's shoulder too. The general public thinks the smooth stuff belched out by Kenny G and Spyro Gyra actually constitutes real jazz, and they pat themselves on the back and feel sophisticated for liking it. And to add insult to injury, all of the major U.S. cities have at least one g igantic 500,000-watt smooth jazz station, such as KTWV 94.7 in L.A. or WNUA 95.5 in Chicago, that gets played in shopping malls and dentist offices everywhere and rakes in millions every year in advertising revenues.

Smooth jazz? You don't wanna know what they put in that stuff.

Last Wendesday the merger happened. I turned on my SIRIUS satellite radio and watched as it automatically updated all the channels and everything became SIRIUS-XM.

I cringed. I knew something on my jazz channel was going to get screwed with.

Thank God, Les Davis was and is still there. Rhonda Hamilton still has her afternoon show.

But they're adding in stuff that's utter sacrilege to purists. Screechy Latin on Saturday nights. Oversynthesized Quincy Jones that the old guard would never have let in the door.

Worst of all, my favorite weekend show with vibraphone legend Gary Burton wasn't on last Sunday.

Some of PureJazz 72 is still okay. But some of it has gone to the dark side.

I feel so violated!

And I'm not alone. I found this posting on the SIRIUS forum about an hour ago:

"I'm not happy with the Real Jazz channel they stuck us with. There is too much contemporary stuff in there. Half the songs on RealJazz I would expect to hear in the waiting room at my dentist's office. The loss of Pure Jazz is going to cause me to cancel 2 of my 3 Sirius subscriptions this week."

The high, high price of a merger in a niche tailor-made for the orthodox purist.

So what's the moral of the story? Never alienate the base. Got a rabid cult following? Keep them happy. Keep them loving you. Stroke their fancies. Stroke their egos. Stroke their well-honed identities. Give them every little thing they ask for. Feed them what they crave. Celebrate with them how much they're unlike the common benighted groundlings. Remind them that they're special. Remind them how the rest of the world just doesn't get it. Remind them that they're an elite and renegade breed.

And they'll love you for a lifetime.

To your online success,

Bryan Todd

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