Central Perk

joi, 26 aprilie 2012

Celebrating National Parks Week

Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, April 26, 2012

Celebrating National Parks Week

Did you know that there are nearly 400 national parks across our country? This week we celebrate all of them. From the Grand Canyon to Gettysburg, the Virgin Islands to the Hawaiian Volcanoes – each of our parks is a place to explore, learn and be active. And this week, they are all free!

President Barack Obama and his family hike on Cadillac Mountain at Acadia National Park in Maine, July 16, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Near Miss or Near Perfect? New Match Behaviour Coming to Google

Posted: 25 Apr 2012 08:45 AM PDT

Google announced new matching behaviour just over a week ago, nicknamed 'near exact and phrase': exact keywords will match misspellings and 'close variants', and phrase keywords will cover searches containing misspellings or close variants of the phrase. It's not live yet (and won't be until mid-May) but the setting for the new behaviour is already available in all campaigns and is switched on by default.

So, should you opt in or out? Here are my thoughts:

What will the effects be?

Even if you turn the setting off, you can still be affected.

As campaigns are opted in by default, it seems likely that the majority of advertisers will be using this new match behaviour. So there may well be a sudden increase in competition on misspellings and close variants – clearly this will affect you if you already bid on them.

Could it homogenise performance? There’ll suddenly be a whole group of search terms under one bid, where previously there was only one term. If many competitors have [widget] on near exact match, they'll be using the same bid for 'widget' and 'widgets' – if 'widgets' is more competitive and needs a higher bid, the competitors might increase the bid on [widget] and so make 'widget' more expensive too. Different variants will still perform differently – there isn't a change in the searchers, so you wouldn't expect a change in conversion rate – but CPCs of variants may converge.

But shouldn't I be bidding on all these variants anyway?

Proper keyword research should uncover many variants. But it’s likely that some will be rare enough to have the dreaded ‘low search volume’ status: that means Google won’t let you directly advertise for them, but you could bid on them indirectly with near exact match. Also, it's nigh impossible to find all possible variants – searchers are very inventive when it comes to misspellings.

Doing the keyword research to find variants takes time, and (as the cliché says) time is money. Ad impressions on irrelevant search terms are also money. The question is: which is less money? Google may let in some dud search terms, but it may cover relevant variants you wouldn’t have found otherwise.

You could use near exact as part of your keyword research: have an exploratory campaign with the new setting on and fill it with exact match keywords to find the behaviour of their variants. Then take the best performing ones into your regular campaigns (where exact is exact).

Other matters to think about

Will exact or phrase negative keywords' behaviour change? Google's announcement does not mention negative keywords, suggesting only positive ones are affected. There could be benefits to having a near exact match, such as when using 'embedded match', but keeping exact negative actually exact would seem to be better for most advertisers. Even if the new setting is on, you can still exclude individual variants when they don't work.

What happens if you use Conversion Optimiser? Suddenly your exact match keywords will pick up brand new searches you don't have any history for.

What about keyword metrics? The Quality Score and Estimated First Page Bid columns shown in your account are based on searches exactly matching the keyword (whatever the keyword's match type is). In high competition areas merely changing a singular to a plural can impact performance and price, so if you have [widget] on near exact match but most of the searches are for 'widgets' the QS and EFPB may not reflect the keyword's actual performance. QS and EFPB are both averages and thus should be treated with care: this is another thing to bear in mind when looking at them.

So, will you switch it on or opt out?

Ultimately whether you opt in or out depends on your account. It seems unlikely that near exact will help a campaign where variants are already covered and match-types are segregated; having multiple exact match keywords cover the same search terms will get in the way of precision management in the same way that having broad, phrase and exact match keywords in the same ad group will.

On the other hand, if you have campaigns which don't need or can't have that level of management the new setting may well be helpful. Consider testing the new setting – no one knows exactly how it will work out, so no one can say if it will help or hinder your account.

What do you think? Are you trying the new setting, opting out everywhere, or testing with some campaigns? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Seth's Blog : Do you have a people strategy?

Do you have a people strategy?

Hard to imagine a consultant or investor asking the CMO, "so, what's your telephone strategy?"

We don't have a telephone strategy. The telephone is a tool, a simple medium, and it's only purpose is to connect us to interested human beings.

And then the internet comes along and it's mysterious and suddenly we need an email strategy and a social media strategy and a web strategy and a mobile strategy.

No, we don't.

It's still people. We still have one and only one thing that matters, and it's people.

All of these media are conduits, they are tools that human beings use to waste time or communicate or calculate or engage or learn. Behind each of the tools is a person. Do you have a story to tell that person? An engagement or a benefit to offer them?

Figure out the people part and the technology gets a whole lot simpler.

• Email to a friend •

miercuri, 25 aprilie 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Irish Support for Merkozy Treaty Drops to 30% with 39% Undecided; ESM Funds At Risk (But That's a Plus!)
UK Back in Recession, Did it Really Ever Leave? Disappointing Details; Five Reasons the UK Recession Will Get Much Worse
53% of New Graduates are Jobless or Underemployed; Rude Awakening for Class of 2012; Useless Degrees; Who Benefits From Student Aid?

Irish Support for Merkozy Treaty Drops to 30% with 39% Undecided; ESM Funds At Risk (But That's a Plus!)

Posted: 25 Apr 2012 02:43 PM PDT

Ireland was one of few countries to give its voters a say on passing the Merkozy referendum. A couple months ago, support for the treaty was close to 50%. Now, in spite of pro-treaty (and illegal) propaganda from the Irish government, support has fallen to a mere 30%.

The Financial times reports Ireland sees support for fiscal treaty wane.

With six weeks to go before Ireland votes on the European fiscal treaty there are signs the government's campaign for a Yes vote is in danger of unravelling as public attitudes towards austerity harden and instability in Europe feeds into its referendum debate.

On Wednesday the Irish trade union movement said it could not support the treaty, which would tighten budget rules and introduce penalties for states that break the rules. Opponents of the treaty also threatened to take legal action against the government's €2.2m information campaign, which they allege breaches a constitutional requirement in Ireland that all material paid for by public money should be impartial.

"Nobody within our ranks is in agreement with the fiscal treaty," said David Begg, general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, an umbrella body for Irish unions. "Everyone thinks it is a bad treaty. We don't see any merit in it."

"My own view on this is that we are damned if we do and we're damned if we don't," Mr Begg said.

Opinion polls show a slim majority (30 per cent) in favour, with 23 per cent against. But with 39 per cent of the public undecided concern is rising in government circles that opinion could swing against the treaty during the campaign, as it did in 2008 when Ireland rejected the Lisbon treaty.

"The trade unions' position shows the naysayers are growing. You can see from studying social media there is a higher degree of anti-European rhetoric for this referendum," said David Farrell, professor of politics at University College Dublin.

ESM Funds At Risk (But That's a Plus!)

Begg's only concerned is access to European Stability Mechanism if the treaty is not passed. It if a concern no one in Ireland should have.

Ireland should leave the euro and default on the bailout money it has received. Accepting more and more bailout money from the banker parasites in Brussels and the IMF is exactly the wrong thing to do. Greece is proof enough.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

UK Back in Recession, Did it Really Ever Leave? Disappointing Details; Five Reasons the UK Recession Will Get Much Worse

Posted: 25 Apr 2012 09:46 AM PDT

It is amusing to watch economists toss around ridiculous terms like "technical recession" to justify their poor forecasts. The entire eurozone is now in recession and the UK was sure to follow because so much of its trade is with the eurozone. This was easy to predict, yet few did.

The Mail Online reports We ARE back in recession: Economy suffers double dip as GDP figures fall for second quarter in a row

Official figures today showed the economy shrank by 0.2 per cent in the first quarter of 2012

It follows a fall of 0.3 per cent in the final quarter of 2011

Cameron: 'I do not seek to explain away the figures'

Britain has suffered its first double-dip recession since the 1970s after a surprise contraction in the first three months of the year.

Official figures today showed the economy shrank by 0.2 per cent in the first quarter of 2012 having declined by 0.3 per cent in the final quarter of 2011.

It marked the first double-dip since 1975 and was a bitter blow to Chancellor George Osborne in the wake of last month's 'omnishambles' Budget.

The decline in gross domestic product (GDP) was driven by the biggest fall in construction output for three years, while the manufacturing sector failed to return to growth, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

Andrew Smith, chief economist at KPMG, said: 'It's official, we're in a double-dip.

'But worse, output remains broadly unchanged from its level in the third quarter of 2010 and, four years on from its pre-recession peak is still some 4 per cent down – making this slump longer than the 1930s Depression.

UK GDP In Perspective

The UK had five consecutive quarters of growth so I suppose one can make a claim the recession ended. However, look at how feeble that growth has been. Only one quarter exceeded 1% and then just barely.

Moreover, for the last six consecutive quarters, there has not been two consecutive quarters of growth.

I suggest the UK slid back into recession during the 4th quarter of 2010.

Disappointing Details

It's not just the headline numbers that are anemic, the details are also very poor. Via Email from Barclays ...

As expected, construction output declined over the quarter. However, the ONS has made some revisions to the weak January and February data, and assumed some further revisions and a strong March outturn in arriving at the Q1 estimate, so that the estimated 3.0% q/q decline in construction output was less than half the fall we had expected. As a result, construction's -0.2pp contribution to GDP growth was a lot less significant than we had anticipated.

Rather, much of the downside news came on the services side, where February's Index of Services, published alongside the GDP data, disappointed to the downside, and January's estimate was also revised down. Much of the weakness was concentrated in business services and finance, which accounts for almost 40% of total services output, and where activity declined by 0.1% q/q. As a result, overall services output grew by just 0.1% q/q in Q1, and the downside news on services more than offset the upside surprise on construction.

Like the MPC, we had thought that the weakness in the official construction data looked somewhat overdone, and had been prepared to look through downside news from this source. However, the disappointing outturn in services suggests that the economy's underlying growth momentum may be somewhat weaker than previously thought.

The weak GDP outturn, combined with more persistent than expected inflation, highlights the MPC's ongoing policy headache. April's minutes showed the committee increasingly focused on inflation and minded to look through weak official activity data, which it expected to be driven mainly by somewhat dubious construction data. Further QE in May seemed unlikely. The configuration of today's outturn, more than the headline number, may give the committee reason to reassess. We still expect no further QE in May, but this is now a less certain call; and even if QE is not extended then a continued stagnation in demand could yet lead the MPC to act later in the year.

Wishful Thinking

Barclays thinks the UK will "narrowly avoid a further quarter of GDP in Q2".

I don't. Why should it?

Five Reasons the UK Recession Will Get Much Worse

The eurozone is now an economic disaster, credit stress has returned to Spain and Italy
The ECB abandoned the LTRO and is in the midst of huge infighting
UK services took a huge hit and that trend will strengthen
The Eurozone is the UK's largest trading partner and there is no reason for UK exports to the eurozone to rise. In fact, UK exports to the Eurozone, just may collapse.
The better than expected (but still feeble construction numbers) will likely disappoint to the downside soon enough, if not immediately.

If you thought the euro would help Europe, you thought wrong. The Euro made a disaster in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Italy. It's time to abandon that failed idea.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

53% of New Graduates are Jobless or Underemployed; Rude Awakening for Class of 2012; Useless Degrees; Who Benefits From Student Aid?

Posted: 25 Apr 2012 02:35 AM PDT

The USA Today reports graduating class of 2012 is in for a rude awakening as Half of new graduates are jobless or underemployed.

A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don't fully use their skills and knowledge.

Young adults with bachelor's degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that's confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.

Median wages for those with bachelor's degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.

Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade. "I don't even know what I'm looking for," says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.

About 1.5 million, or 53.6%, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41%, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.

Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year. Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less. In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).

According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren't easily replaced by computers.

Useless Degrees

The USA Today talks about the "underemployed". Is that really what's going on?

Just what job does someone majoring in Political Science, English, History, Social Studies, Creative Writing, Art, etc., etc., etc., expect to get?

Arguably, graduates in those majors (and many more) should be thankful to get any job. Therefore, those who do land a job should therefore be considered fully employed, not underemployed.

In turn, this means a college education now has a negative payback for most degrees.

Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum wage, says he has received financial help from his parents to help pay off student loans. He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career. "There is not much out there, it seems," he said.

There is nothing out there for many degrees which means that going to graduate school will do nothing but waste more money. Nurses are still in demand, but technology and engineering majors are crapshoots. If you can land a technology or engineering job it is likely to be high paying, but if not, the next step is retail sales.

Who Benefits From Student Aid?

Students get no benefit from "student aid". Rather, teachers, administrators, and corrupt for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix do.

Obama wants to throw more money at education, and that is exactly the wrong thing to do. Instead, I propose stopping student aid programs and accrediting more online schools to lower the cost of education so that degrees do not have negative payback.

Sadly, there is a trillion dollar student loan bubble, and that debt overhang will negatively impact the economy for years to come. Let's not make the problem worse. It's time to kill the inappropriately named "student aid" program.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Damn Cool Pics

Barack Obama Slow Jams The News On Late Night With Jimmy Fallon
Awesome Playgrounds by Monstrum
Animals Demonstrating Funny Yoga Poses
Let's Explore the Ocean [infographic]
A Frog Sitting On a Bench Like a Human

Barack Obama Slow Jams The News On Late Night With Jimmy Fallon

Posted: 25 Apr 2012 04:51 PM PDT

President Obama made a stop at NBC's Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday for a little slow jamming of the news. In front of a live college audience at the University of North Carolina, Obama talked about student loans while Fallon's house band the Roots jammed on a slow, sensual R&B beat, making the topic seem sexier than you ever thought possible.

Awesome Playgrounds by Monstrum

Posted: 25 Apr 2012 02:11 PM PDT

There is nothing like an awesome playground that makes you feel like a kid again! Danish Monstrum creates playgrounds with focus on design, motor challenges and safety.

Monstrum believes that playground design should be a reflection of the world surrounding us. We see the world as a place full of color. We meet boys that like pink and girls that likes trees, so why only play on a monkey frame and a sandbox, when you can play in a moon crater or a submarine or a giant spider or an enormous snail or a Trojans horse or a rocket or an ant or a princess castle. The fantasy is infinite. The visual effect can indulge from a far, a tall slide, a massive tower or a wave to play on can draw kids in from the street.

As artists and designers and through our experience with building theatrical set-design at numerous theaters in Copenhagen, we have the knowledge to combine elements where not only physical activities and play evolve, but also with a visual story that creates a space where fantasy thrives.

Animals Demonstrating Funny Yoga Poses

Posted: 25 Apr 2012 01:04 PM PDT

Who needs yoga classes when we can learn from cute animals instead? Here's another amazing animal list from the folks at Buzzfeed.

Let's Explore the Ocean [infographic]

Posted: 25 Apr 2012 11:55 AM PDT

James Cameron's recent journey to the deepest part of the Pacific ocean opened the door for future exploration of the sea floor. But despite covering 72 percent of Earth and supplying more than 70 percent of the world's oxygen, there's still a lot we don't know about our planet's life support system.