Keeping the upcoming holiday season in mind, Microsoft adCenter has upgraded its reporting tools and features so that the advertisers will be able to understand their accounts better. The user interface for the client has seen majority of the changes, it allows you to manage keywords across your entire campaign and various ad groups simultaneously. Not only this, you will now be able to filter the account in almost any way possible so that you keep only the data that you want.

The Campaign setup is quite user friendly in the new user interface, as you can do an ad preview right on the page. You can compare up to five different performance metrics in the same place with the new multi-metric trend charts on the Home and Campaign tabs. With a Cut and paste feature, you can move the data within the desktop.

According to Microsoft, the keyword grid is much improved too as you can review keyword impression and positional bid estimates with the estimation feature. When you will know the estimates for every keyword position, you can easily plan your expenditure and also the keywords to invest in.

The upgraded opportunities tab now offers bid suggestions for keywords that are exact matches or broad match. With this upgrade, you can zero in on the keywords not performing up to the mark.

The other updates listed by Microsoft are:

• “An improved historical and aggregated Quality Score data in reporting so you can view your aggregated quality score by time frame, including hour, day, week, month or a summary. This helps provide better insights into opportunities for improvement
• An upgrade to Change History reports so you can view changes made to targeting, and gain better insights into campaign performance related to targeting changes
• Last, the new Keyword ID field designed to make it easier for API users to update their bids
• An upgraded Homepage Dashboard with a new feature to track campaign performance more easily
• A new Share of Voice feature that quantifies missed impressions in Account, Campaign, and Ad Group performance reports and helps prioritize optimizations more effectively.”

Will these updates make it easier for you to manage your campaigns? Do share your views.

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Microsoft adCenter Upgrades Tools And Features For 2011 Holiday Season!

To tighten up the AdCenter Relevancy and Quality Policy for ads served to the U.S and Canada, Microsoft has announced certain changes w.e.f 31st August.

But as per Microsoft, they will begin enforcing such changes only after leaving the advertisers with significant time to make their own changes.

As per the new policy;

The landing page should be relevant to keyword and should neither display any sensational and lucrative content neither any tricky and confusing contents. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is not necessary unless and until anyone is availing the services or completing any purchase.

The landing page must direct the user to the homepage or main content defining services and other terms before driving the user to sign up.

Sites that “Bait and switch” the user will be marked as a low-value user experience in the Landing Page and Site User Experience section.

Marketplace sites that deceive the users with misrepresented contents or tricks them to share their personally identifiable information shall be excluded by Microsoft

More is available in the detailed policy on this recent development.

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Microsoft Rolls Out Stricter AdCenter Relevancy and Quality Norms!

Microsoft is sending out emails to announce that they are enhancing their site targeting  feature for the content ads.

The main aim behind rolling out this enhancement is to provide the users with more control over the distribution aspect of their ads. It will allow the users to select from a list of over 20 Yahoo! properties and three Microsoft websites to specifically target content ads.

So, how does your content ads work? Microsoft adCenter “analyzes the content of a website to determine its meaning, and then matches relevant, keyword-targeted ads to display on the page.”

Content ads is a massive market with over 43 billion ad impressions per month. To that end, Microsoft has provided adCenter users with an easy to follow four step guide in order to help your content ads campaign succeed.

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Now Microsoft's adCenter Content Ads To Get More Site Targeting Options!

Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers who have not yet moved their accounts to Microsoft adCenter should take note of this. The transition tool inside their YSM account will be permanently closed on January 5, 2011.

Though the ad serving transition had been completed back in October 2010, and the majority of the accounts have moved by then, the remaining account holders have to do so till January 5. Post the date, the accounts can only be transitioned manually by exporting and importing campaigns into the adCenter.

If you are not sure whether you have moved the account or not, Yahoo! offers an easy way to check. A quick glance at the account would tell you if you did transitioned the account or not. An “adCenter” tab with a “Get Started” button on the account as you log in, is an indication that the account is not transitioned yet.

The transition is a part of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance that makes optimum use of the collective potency of Yahoo! and Microsoft in effective searching and gives maximum benefit to advertisers.

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Yahoo! Transition Tool To Close Permanently on January 5

The upgradation of Microsoft adCentre summer 2010 has been completed with the addition of new advance features. These new features will help the users in managing the overall search and content advertising strategies. Most of these features are the ones requested by the visitors in the adCenter community. These features are designed to get a better insight and performance by being user friendly. Some of the new features are as follows:

1. Reasons for Disapproval of Ads and Keywords

Now with this new editorial dashboard feature, users will be able to find out the reasons for the disapproval of ads and keywords. In order to fix up the issue and know the exact way, suggestions would be there on how to modify the ad. However, if before creating any campaign, the user familiarizes himself with adCenter Editorial Guidelines, all these disapprovals would be easily avoided.



2. Inclusion of Performance Dashboard

Now the user can see a performance dashboard on the adCenter homepage, that will provide the summary of the performance of the user's campaign and will help the user to optimize it accordingly. User can view options like spend vs. budget quickly along with the campaign impressions, CTR, clicks, conversions and average CPC. To get information on optimization by specific key performance indicators, user can visit SEM Intermediate Series of posts.

3. Expansion Of The Date Range For Reports

Talking about this feature, here the date range has been expanded, which was 90-days for the reports, to allow for year, on the demand of our community visitors. Visit Justin Vanning’s post, to know more Help Improve Your adCenter Campaign Performance with adCenter Reports.

4. Special Feature To Locate Time And Zone

With this new feature, user can now schedule his reports in the same time zone suiting the user's location by selecting the hour of the day and selecting the time zone. Besides this, by using the targeting feature in adCenter, the user can keep a track over the reports.

5. Better Import

The new enhanced import wizard will help the user by guiding step-by-step, whenever the user import the campaign data from other search engines. To know more visit and use adCenter Desktop.

6. Expansion In Reach For Content Ads

With this, now the advertisers are able to expand their reach as they can now place text ads next to relevant content on websites in the Microsoft Media Network. To know more on crucial campaign planning visit Microsoft Advertising Intelligence.

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Microsoft adCenter summer 2010 upgrades with New Features

The 6th SEMPO Search Engine Marketing Report is out. The report is an outcome of an online survey of almost 1,500 client-side marketers (advertisers) and agency respondents, from across 68 countries.

Here are a few important points from the report:

• As per the report, the North American search engine marketing industry has grown by 8% (from $13.5B in 2008 to $14.6B in 2009) and is projected to reach a value of $16.6B in 2010, an anticipated 14% growth.
• Companies continue to channel money into search engine marketing, moving away from direct mail (36%), conferences and exhibitions (24%), web display advertising (23%), and mostly from print advertising (49%).
• Google continues to be the dominant search engine for paid advertising, with 97% of companies paying to advertise on Google AdWords, 50% use Yahoo! Search (on decline since 2008) and 44% use Bing.

In fact, 71% of companies advertise on Google search network, while 56% use the Google content network (keyword targeted).

Talking specifically of the organic SEO industry, here are a few positive signs:

• Companies expect to spend 43% more on SEO in 2010 (44% specifically for North America)
• More than half of companies (52%) expect to spend more on SEO in 2010
• The number of companies who engage in search engine optimization (90%) has remained steady since 2007

Given that economy as a whole has improved over the last year, it is no surprise that PPC is poised to grow at healthy rate too. Here are a few indicators:

• Companies expect to spend 37% more on paid search in 2010 (38% for North America)
• 50% of the companies surveyed expect to spend more on paid search in 2010
• On a side note, proportion of companies (53%) not using a third party bid management technology, relying on search engine tools and Excel, for paid search marketing has decreased from earlier 57%

Social media, which is a new addition to the survey this time promises to be an interesting segment to watch. Data from the report suggests that growth will be slow and nothing spectacular is expected soon.

• 73% of the companies had a budget of less than $25,000 for social media marketing in 2009. 23% had no budget for this at all.
• Measurement of ROI is a major concern for 63% of the companies when it comes to social media. The related figures for SEO are 42% and 43% for PPC.
• On a brighter note, three quarters of companies are using Facebook (74%) and Twitter (73%) to promote their brands or companies.

The number of companies investing in organic SEO has remained steady. In fact, the projection for total business has gone up quite positively. But even then, more than half of the companies (51%) are spending less than $25000 a year on SEO. The corresponding figure for PPC much lower at 31% only.

When it comes to proportion of SEO budget spent with agencies, 43% of companies do not spend any of their natural search budgets with agencies.

It seems that the allocated budget for SEO by companies might go up in 2010. 52% of the companies expect to spend more on SEO in 2010 than in 2009. Only 9% companies will shrink their SEO budgets.

Summing it up, we can look forward to a happy, prosperous 2010. There quite a few details I would like to have talked about but I am running out of paper here

Let me know your thoughts and if there is something you would like me to dive in the report for.

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SEO Industry Projected To Grow by 14% in 2010: SEMPO State of Search Engine Marketing Survey 2010

After releasing the site targeting functionality for content Ads in the U.S., Microsoft has now enabled the adCenter to do bidding for two hot commodity MSN sites – the MSN Tech & Gadgets portal and web-based email, Hotmail.

You just have to put in little efforts to optimize your Content Ads campaign with the following process:

• The very step involves creation of new ad group and setting bid type for websites and networks.
• Creating the ad.
• Choose the websites tab in the Select Placements window.
• If you want to target both Gadgets and Tech or Hotmail sites, just copy and paste the URL's individually:

           tech.msn.com

           *mail.live.com

• Click View available placements.
• After selecting the sites you want to bid on, Click Add.
• Click Continue.
• Set the Default bid – It is suggested to set the default bid between $1.00 to $2.00 and wait for 5-7 days before adjusting.

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Now Bid for MSN Tech & Gadgets, Hotmail on adCenter

Microsoft adCenter has started releasing its Fall 2009 upgrade. The official Microsoft Community blog is saying that the upgrade will include improvements in account management, reporting and will also have a few new features.

Here's the link to the blog.

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Microsoft AdCenter Fall 2009 Upgrade is Out

There is no doubt that keywords play a crucial role in search engine ranking of a website but many people are not aware of the basic keyword research process done by using the adCenter user interface. One of the reasons is that UI method do not match the level of information offered by the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence as advertisers. But, there are certain things that the new search engine marketers should know to get familiar with the beginners resources for keyword expansion.

Are you new to search engine marketing and are a bit apprehensive of using Microsoft Advertising Intelligence? A post on Microsoft Advertising community is talking about expanding the keywords through User Interface.

Here are the step-by-step instructions discussed in the post to do keyword research:

After you log in to adCenter, click on the “Research” tab in the blue bar present along the top.

You will see a few options in searching for new keywords in the research tab.

When you will enter a keyword, adCenter will provide you results that are related to the keyword. These might help you in expanding your keyword list.   In case you will enter the URL of a website, adCenter will search the site for terms that could be included in your list, if you don't have them at present.   After selecting the search method, you can refine the search in terms of language and market, business category, age group or a specific option that you find appealing. You can leave the defaults in place to generalize the results.   Let's taken an example of what would occur if you are costume retailer and want to expand your list to meet increasing demand presented by Halloween. If you will do a search for the keyword “costumes”, following sample of top results will be displayed:  

  In case you want demographic targeting in your campaign, you will be able to procure relevant research data easily. You will see a “play” button after these terms, click on those buttons and a drop down information box will be displayed to give detailed information about each search result.  

  Look out for the keyword you think will be most helpful for the campaign. You should also check out the box present at the box left to each keyword you would like to include. After finishing the process, click the “Add” button to add the selected terms to your approved suggestions list.  

  The list of approved terms will be appear on the right side of the original list. Click the “Continue” button present near the top of the search area.  

  Set the pricing on the next screen. The minimum default bid is .05. If you will set a bid below .25 or lower, it can hurt the chances of participating competitively, hence the result will affect overall performance of the campaign. After setting the max cost-per-click bid, click the “Apply” button and move forward to place the keywords into an ad group by clicking “Continue” button.  

  The last step is to add new keywords to the ad group. You can simple use drop down menus for choosing the correct account, ad group, campaign and then click “Add to ad group” button.  

  Once you are done with this step, a dialog box will open that would tell you how successfully you have added the keywords to the ad group.   Hope this information will be helpful for those who are new to adCenter.

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Steps to do Keyword Research in adCenter

AdCenter blog-Microsoft Community on Tuesday announced a pilot for new Image Ads offering in the U.S from Microsoft. Microsoft is looking for small-sizes to mid-sized businesses to test it with them. Image ads are meant for displaying ads that can be easily purchased on a CPC or a CPM-basis. These ads are currently available on Content Ads network, including top MSN sites. They are great tool to reach content and refine your ROI.

For taking part in these ads , you need to have your own IAB Standard creative and tags. One can participate in the following manner:

1. To handle your account on your own, then call the 1-800-518-5689 support line and ask to get you enrolled into Performance Improvement program and the Image Ads Pilot
2. For Managed Service program, then you can ask your Account rep about the Image Ads Pilot

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Help Microsoft To Test Their New Image Ads Pilot

This is very interesting to know that adCenter team is getting feedback from the advertisers and thereby improving features to give you more control over over targeting, bidding and distribution of the several advertising campaigns.

The adCenter provides Feedback Form that allows the advertisers to fill up their feedback that will help adCenter team to improve advertising features.

Further, the adCenter offers Feedback & Feature Request Thread on its discussion forums, which enables the advertisers to share their opinions and see other's views as well.

All these steps have been taken to enhance and improve different advertising campaigns. As mentioned in the blog of Carolyn Miller, feedbacks and requests from advertisers will be seen by the appropriate teams at Microsoft and immediate action will be taken.

According to the adCenter team, people sharing their feedback and requests need to mention the reason as to why certain features are important for them, because it helps the team to evaluate good ideas.

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Now share your adCenter Feedback and Feature Requests

The Microsoft Advertising Blog reported that Microsoft advertisers are now offered with the option to purchase high quality, premium on-deck display inventory in the Verizon Wireless Ad Network on a Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost Per Action (CPA) basis.

Yes, Microsoft has recently rolled out a set of new frequency capping options for display media running on the Verizon Wireless Ad Network in order to help advertisers with greater control over their mobile advertising investments. With the new options Verizon Network advertisers will be able to maintain the strictest frequency goals across multiple on-deck browsing sessions, which will further help them maximize campaign reach without being too creative.

Along, Microsoft is all set to manage and optimize Verizon Performance campaigns on an on-going basis, while ensuring that advertisers will continue to get all the powerful demographic ad targeting options from the combination of Microsoft and Verizon Wireless Network. While doing this, Microsoft and Verizon will also take care of the consumer privacy. They are not likely to collect or store any personally identifiable user information with these new mobile products.

In the meanwhile, Microsoft also brings online-grade accountability standards to its Verizon Wireless Ad Network display inventory. Now, advertisers can independently verify the impression delivery and click performance of their campaigns running on the Verizon Wireless Ad Network, as well as they can use third party system tools like Atlas DMT and DoubleClick DART for online campaign monitoring.

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Microsoft Comes Up With Options To Boost Performance And Accountability Of Its Verizon Mobile Advertising Solutions!

A report from LegitScript.com and KnujOn was doing the rounds earlier this week which stated that 89.7 percent of Bing's ads for online pharmacies came from illegally operating pharmacies.

Microsoft has finally responded to the claims and said that the report is true, however, it confirmed that the violation percentage is substantially lower than reported number. Microsoft adCenter uses PharmacyChecker.com, an online pharmacy verification service, to verify pharmacy advertisers. PharmacyChecker.com is a competitor of LegitScript.com.

Microsoft says that the illegal pharmacies hacked the system:

“Based on our initial findings, we believe the advertisers noted in the report found a way to work around the PharmacyChecker.com verification process after being validated to advertise on Bing. These rogue advertisers manipulated the system by "hijacking" and/or misusing landing pages. Our internal teams are continuing to investigate how these advertisers sidestepped the policy.”

Meanwhile, adCenter is considering several steps to address this problem. A few of the steps are:

• All pharma-related keywords have now been manually reviewed to sweep out any advertisers who are in violation of adCenter policies
• The editorial team is validating the claims in the report around "hijacking" and misuse of landing pages
• The quality and editorial teams are reviewing adCenter processes to document how these advertisers made their way onto their system. This documentation will likely lead to changes in process as well as product requests moving forward.

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Microsoft adCenter Responds To Accusations of Illegal Pharmacy Advertisements

Microsoft adCenter recently launched Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, formerly known as Add-In for Excel. This tool is now available in the US, UK, France and Canada.

This keyword research and optimization tool will help you maximize ROI for your keyword campaigns with:

• Keyword expansion
• Research
• Pricing
• KPI data

However, users in the U.S. will be able to view certain additional features like Vertical Top List, Vertical KPI’s and Content Impressions by Month. These features will help in creating more effective Content Ads campaigns.

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AdCenter Rebrands Add-in for Excel to Microsoft Advertising Intelligence

Rebranding of Live Search to Bing has created a lot of concerns among users. To solve this issue the Microsoft's adCenter team has finally took to its blog.

According to the team, rebranding will not change adCenter at all. Almost everything remains the same; from number of ads being displayed, ad rules to ad position – nothing will change. There will not be any new ad units as well.

However, there will be changes in algorithm. But it is not something new because Microsoft's adCenter has constantly changed the algorithm. There could be an increase in traffic, since there is a buzz about Bing and Microsoft's $80-100 million ad campaign for the new search engine.

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Microsoft's adCenter Team Finally Answers Questions Regarding Bing!

Are you a Microsoft adCenter user? If yes, then you will surely be excited about the launch of an upgraded Microsoft adCenter Spring 2009. This newest version is a bundle of new features that will provide you better control over campaigning management elements like targeting, bidding and ad distribution. All the improvements done in Spring 2009 are worth noting. Right from greater control over content ads distribution to improved performance of campaigns and account management, the adCenter team has ensured that the upgraded version covers every aspect.

Here are some of the highlights of the new adCenter filled with plenty of new features:

Account Management Updates

• Spring 2009 has a new home page and alerts.
• It is a better way of managing the account settings.
• Users can also use Windows Live ID to sign into adCenter.

Here is a list of some of the adCenter Desktop Updates:

• Managing more keywords and faster speed are its prime features.
• Edit as you browse.
• You can easily update existing ads in bulk and update all the bids at a group level.
• Targeting of customers by city and state.
• Preview of imported data.

Campaign Management Updates

• Get greater control and flexibility on keyword bids with Spring 2009.
• You can apply customer targeting and incremental bids for the campaign along with a new campaign-level targeting. After this further refine targeting at ad group level.
• The new version also has improved keyword tools.

If you want to know more about the newly introduced Spring 2009 and see the feature guide of Microsoft, visit the What's New in adCenter page on the Microsoft Advertising Learning Center. You can also get some detailed feature reviews, advice and tips on the upgrade at adCenter community blog.

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Grab the New Microsoft adCenter Spring 2009 with a Host of New Features

Microsoft adCenter has released some latest conversion tracking options. The new options will allow marketers to track their ROI, gain insight into consumer's buying patterns and view relevant keywords to generate more sales.

Following are some of the main features of the new conversion tracking option:

• Count One Conversion Per Click: adCenter will only count the first conversion to occur after the click. Any subsequent conversions will not be counted unless they originate from a new click.
• Count One Conversion Per Unique URL: Under this mode, your site will "tell" us when a new conversion event has taken place. This allows you to synchronize adCenter's conversion counts very closely to your own system. To take advantage of this method, you will need to be able to update your site to generate a unique transaction code to represent the conversion. This is a more complicated option for some advertisers, but it can deliver better results.
• Count All: Some advertisers want all of the events to be reported, and they already have sites that are designed to eliminate repeat-visit problems. This option ensures that all conversion events are reported.

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New Conversion Tracking Options Released by Microsoft adCenter

Microsoft recently made an announcement that it will end its adCenter Analytics beta program for everyone. As far as the exciting users are concerned, they will no longer have access to the program after December 31, 2009.

"Our team would like to sincerely thank you for your participation and your invaluable contributions to the program. Our objectives at the outset were to serve the needs of small and midsize self-service customers, as well as evolve the Microsoft strategy to address the Web analytics space."

"It enabled us to confidently determine that we can be of most value to advertisers and publishers by offering a tailored solution that meets more specialized needs."

Stay tuned for more official announcements.

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Microsoft Announces Closure of adCenter Analytics!

Microsoft has announced that the Microsoft adCenter Desktop (Beta) client can now be used by a lot more qualified advertisers. It was in the month of June, 2008, when Microsoft adCenter Desktop (Beta) was first announced at SMX Advanced.

“If you are a U.S. or Canadian advertiser with fewer than 100,000 keywords in your combined adCenter accounts, the next time you sign in, you may notice a “What’s New” banner that contains an invitation for you to download the Microsoft adCenter Desktop (Beta).”

Now the next time when you will login (only if you qualify for this), you will see a “What’s New” banner, arrayed with some information as to how you can download the Microsoft adCenter Desktop (Beta).

If you are in the UK or France, then you don't have to wait for long, as the feature is coming soon there (within weeks)!

Visit Learning Center for more information!

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Microsoft adCenter Desktop (Beta) Opens For More Advertisers!

Microsoft's adCenter has come up with two new options for adCenter Performance Data. These are: New Custom Date Range & Filter Options. The former one allows you to utilize data for up to 31 consecutive days within the last two years. Else you can make use of the existing adCenter preset date ranges as well (provided they work for you).

The later one is just similar to the filter options that we use in Microsoft Excel. It allows to:

• Find apt and relevant information by applying column filters to campaign performance grids.
• Focus on the high-performing keywords.
• Display keywords with high spend but low click-through rate.
• Optimizing them.
• Manipulate the data.

Mel Carson, states that:, "Now you can apply custom filters to refine your performance data in adCenter. Finding the information that is most important to you by applying column filters to your campaign performance grids can help you hide low-performing keywords and let you focus on the high-performing ones. "

Check this out: adCenter January 2009 Upgrade Feature Guide

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adCenter Rolls Out Two New Features: New Custom Date Range & Filter Options