SEOptimise » microsoft adcenter

How Is adCenter Different to AdWords?

Tamsin Mehew — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:08:41 +0000

So you’re advertising on Google, but you want to branch out to Bing? There’s a new audience for you there, with less competition and less cost!

Microsoft adCenter is in many ways similar to AdWords. Your ads appear on searches that match your positive keywords but not your negative keywords. Your account contains campaigns, which contain ad groups, which contain keywords and ads. Your ad’s position and the price of a click are determined by your bid and previous performance. But there are many differences – here are some of the most important ones for when you’re starting out.

Markets and Locations

In adCenter, there are separate options for Market and for Location. The Market determines what language you can use and which websites your ads appear on. Location determines where the users are.

So if your Market is ‘UK – English’, and you target all Locations, then your ads will appear on English websites like uk.msn.com to visitors from anywhere in the world. If the Market is ‘UK – English’ and the Location is United Kingdom, the ads will be on the same websites, but only visitors from the UK will see your ads.

The current Markets are USA (in English or Spanish), Canada (French or English), UK (English), France (English) and Singapore (English). You choose a campaign’s Market when you create the campaign, and it can’t be changed afterwards. Location can be set at campaign or ad group level, and can be changed at any time.

Learn more here.

Normalisation

All search terms and keywords – regardless of match type – are normalised. AdCenter will ignore CapITAlisAtion, áccents and most #punctuation. Note that plurals are left unchanged.

Apostrophes are treated differently to other punctuation. If an apostrophe appears in a name or in the middle of a word, it will be left, so “O’Brian” is different from “OBrian” or “O Brian”. If an apostrophe is used in a possessive, the non-possessive form will be used, e.g. “Keiko’s” is the same as “Keiko” but not “Keikos” or “Keiko s”.

Words like ‘the’, ‘of’, ‘what’, ‘for’ and ‘a’ are ignored. This means adCenter sees no difference between the searches “Keyword”, “How to Keyword” and “What is Keyword for?” – any of these terms can trigger an ad that has ‘Keyword’ on exact match. Negative keywords are normalised the same as positive ones, so you can’t stop this.

Microsoft’s explanation of normalisation is here.

Dynamic Text and Placeholders

In AdWords, you can use Dynamic Keyword Insertion to put terms from the search query into your ad. AdCenter has a similar feature, which allows extra information.

Firstly, you can put {keyword} into your ad, and this will be replaced by the triggered keyword when the ad appears.

Secondly, adCenter will let you give your keywords three Placeholder parameters, which can then be inserted into adverts. You might have keywords that are misspellings, and use a Placeholder for the correct spelling to appear in the advert. Or you could have keywords for different products, and use Placeholders for their price or special offer information.

Microsoft’s help page for dynamic text is here.

And Some More…

Negative keywords can be phrase or exact match, but not broad. Positive keywords can be broad match, phrase match or exact match (although broad match is a bit less broad than it is in AdWords).

AdCenter has demographic data available on searchers logged into Microsoft or MSN accounts. This means there are demographic targeting options, where you can exclude or change bids based on age group or gender. You can also get age group and gender reports.

AdCenter gives search query reports (available in the Report tab), but they do not give search query information for search terms that generate no clicks. The number of impressions given is not the actual number of impressions for a search term; adCenter only reports the number of impressions that occurred within an hour of a click.

10 Non-Google SEO Ways to Promote your Business Online in 2009

Tad Chef — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:51:07 +0000

The Road to Tomorrow (and Happy 2009!). Creative Commons license by Stuck in Customs.

While Twitter has become the perhaps single most important social site for marketers this year it’s time to reevaluate the ways to promote your business online in 2009.

Are the methods we used in 2008 still valid? Do they still work? Or do we have to adapt again in 2009 to a whole new Web? Moreover: Which ways outside the Google search moloch are there?

Thus I picked the 10 Non-Google SEO Ways to Promote your Business Online in 2009. With SEO I mean the strict definition so that PPC, email marketing and affiliate marketing etc. are not included regardless of their worth.

Twitter! Do I need to say more about that? Connect with your peers, fans, clients and inform about special offers etc.
Blogging at a hosted blog on your domain is still the best interface for your online business, your clients love it, people loosely interested in your offering love it, Google loves it
YouTube videos are quite frequently on top of Google search results and the site has millions of visitors on its own, Will it Blend? Yes you can as well.
LinkedIn is the number one place to find professionals in each category, you can also determine the authority of any expert by his contributions (not necesessarily by the number of connections)
Social shopping sites are the new kid on the block you can’t ignore. They boomed in late 2008 and can’t be ignored anymore.
Shopping search engines, especially for ecommerce sites are still big, everybody uses them o compare products and prices. You must be there.
Yahoo Answers + other Q&A sites unless you are in a business where everybody knows everthing by heart ;-)
Review sites like TripAdvisor, not only for the travel sector both influence consumers like no other websites and they propel your Google Local listings to the top too
Local sites and local search like TrueLocal, Yell.com, Qype.co.uk allow people to find what they want in their vicinity, they are becoming more popular due to the smartphones and netbooks wave
Niche communities, for all kinds of businesses, it might be forums, Ning comunities, niche social sites like Sphinn for search marketers

Viewing this list it might occur to you that it’s important to use several crucial sites that matter. In a way most of these are “search” or “hub” sites depending on what you look for. Do not focus mainly on Google.

The above sites and services make you succeed in Google as a side-effect. They work directly in the first place by guiding consumers in your direction.

5 Common Content Network Mistakes

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 13:22:00 +0000

I’ve found the content network is an excellent method of getting large quantities of cheap traffic converting at a positive ROI. But in my experience most pay per click campaigns I’ve taken over have not maximised their performance on the content network, below are the main reasons why I’ve found accounts seem to under perform.

Disregarding the content network completely
Many advertisers focus only on the search network, I think Anton Konikoff’s quote about getting traffic from contextual ads at SES San Jose yesterday sums up why it’s always worth trying to target this audience; “Provides access to everyone who reads online (not just those who search)”.
Not setting individual content network bids
Some people don’t check the “Let me set separate prices for content clicks” campaign setup box, the quality of traffic from the content network is never (or at least very rarely) as high as the search network so you should definitely be setting separate bids here.
Targeting all worldwide locations
Click fraud for contextual ads is a commonly discussed issue and is one of the main reasons people choose to stay away from the content network completely. I normally begin by selecting the main English speaking countries (US, UK, Canada, Ireland and Australia). For high budget account’s it also makes sense to separate countries and regions into individual campaigns so that it’s performance can be tracked and managed individually.
Not splitting keywords into small ad groups
This has obvious advantages for the search network as you can use more specifically targeted ad descriptions for each keyword, but it also helps to monitor the cost per conversion of content network clicks more closely.
Failing to test, test, test
This is probably the final rule in every search marketing list but trial and error testing is very important to monitor how new changes have affected the account. Keeping a close eye on the cost per conversion figure will help you to set bids based upon it’s performance to keep the campaign cost-effective.

These are all fairly basic tips but I’ve found these changes have a positive impact upon many account’s advertising on the content. To improve this further you could also exclude negative sites and setup pay per action (PPA) and site targeted campaigns.

How www.microsoft.co.uk Could Make Millions on Google UK!

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:27:00 +0000

Do Microsoft have a UK internet strategy? If you search for any of their products on Google.co.uk (with the UK filter applied) it certainly doesn’t look like it! Below are some fine examples of where Microsoft should be at the top for both natural and paid search listings but surprisingly appear in neither. This is happening because they use a .com domain suffix hosted in the US, making use of www.microsoft.co.uk would get them listed naturally for all of the below searches and very likely #1 for each term, saving them money on both AdWords clicks and the direct sales from retail websites!

Google UK search for Microsoft:

Google UK search for Microsoft adCenter:

Google UK search for Microsoft Office:

Google UK search for Microsoft Windows:

And it doesn’t end here, Overture’s UK keyword research tool shows the huge popularity of Microsoft searches in the UK. But instead of seeing Microsoft.com listed, users are given the choice of review or e-commerce websites instead. In many cases Amazon ranks #1 (e.g. Microsoft Outlook) so people may choose to buy second-hand software from Amazon Marketplace or eBay instead, costing Microsoft thousands if not millions of income from new sales.

While generally it’s good practice to use one domain name (consolidating all inbound links) in this case using www.microsoft.co.uk could have a massive impact on the UK search market, redirecting to www.microsoft.com/en/gb does little for their UK search traffic as the domain is hosted in the US.

The UK search traffic is obviously converting sales, you just have to look at the sponsored links to see how many sites bid upon Microsoft keywords. Interestingly many of these use the trademarked term “Microsoft” within the ad title or description, this seems to be appearing because the ad’s are using dynamic keyword insertion to get around the Google AdWords trademark policy but if Microsoft aren’t even bidding on the keywords themselves they’re less likely to be concerned about the sites which are.

Perhaps Bill Gates has made far too much money by now to be worrying about Microsoft’s UK sales and search traffic! :)

Internet World conference highlights

Kevin Gibbons — Thu, 03 May 2007 13:54:00 +0000

Yesterday I attended the Internet World conference in Earls Court, London. I’ve never been to the event before but found many of the conferences and exhibitions very useful, below I’ve listed some of the main notes I took away from the day.

Microsoft adCenter
The first talk I attended was from Microsoft adCenter, this was basic but my experience of adCenter isn’t great so I found this useful.

Some information I found useful was:

The Average MSN searcher spends £2,000 online in 6 months (I think this must be based upon adCenter conversion information).
Over 11 million people in UK use MSN Messenger
8.8 million people in UK have an MSN Hotmail account
Over 5 million people use Live search each month in the UK
adCenter audience “is also more likely to convert than any other – 70% more than the average UK searcher and over twice as likely as Google searchers.”

This also talked about how Windows Live Passport details are used for demographic targeting, this allow you to bid upon keywords targeted to a specific age group or gender. An NNR Megaview Search report showed in May- July 2006 that Microsoft adCenter had a 4.5% conversion rate, compared to Google’s 2.1% and Yahoo’s 4.1, demographic targeting must help towards this and it sounds like it would work very well to increase conversion rates. This was highlighted by examples of the age groups searching for “Disney holidays” as opposed to “Saga holidays”, it was also interesting to find that a higher percentage of males searches for “lipstick” (for presents, I hope), while females will actually know what they are looking for more specifically and search for keywords such as “mac lipstick” far more frequently than men. If a Windows Live Passport cookie is not found the ad will run at the minimum bid level.

The Future of Blogging
This session was run by Loïc Le Meur, formerly of SixApart, talking about the history of blogging, why people like the reality and honesty of blogs (as highlighted by this look at the Burger King advertising) and how this has influenced people, explaining that the total coverage of all blogs in France outnumbers the amount of media attention. This moved on to look at the direction blogging is going, starting by making the point that the popularity of blogging has grown so much that people will have too many email/blog comments to possibly reply to and will end up paying attention to their friends first. Maybe monitoring where friends are traveling to on sites like Dopplr or reading messages on Twitter, even if it is “I’ve just tied my shoelaces”!

Google AdWords – Delivering ROI through a search marketing case study
Russ Cohn works for Google’s online team and he talked about his experience as a direct account manager for one Google’s larger AdWords advertisers in the UK, Hoovers. To be honest this was aimed more at businesses looking to learn more about improving their conversion rates, explaining about the importance of keyword research, ad copy testing, landing page quality and how an ad’s quality score, CTR and maximum bid can effect the final cost per click and postioning.

I also caught part of some other useful sessions which talked about Web 2.0, targeting multiple user platforms, B2B marketing, Pay-Per-Click and web usability, as well as gaining some useful information from some of the UK’s leading SEO companies which were exhibiting. Hopefully I’ll have some more updates during the year from further SEO conferences, I booked the ad:tech London event ages ago so they’ll be at least one.

Pay Per Click Roundup 23/4/2007

Kevin Gibbons — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:13:00 +0000

I meant to post this on Friday but didn’t quite get round to it, anyway here’s a recap of the pay-per-click advertising news I found of interest during the last week.

Google AdWords

On the Radio: more on Audio Ads – Inside AdWords
Introducing preferred cost bidding – Inside AdWords
Using Google Analytics with Website Optimizer – Google Analytics Blog
Google AdWords Preferred Cost Bidding Not Welcomed – SERoundtable
Google Pay Per Action First Results For Publishers & Advertisers – SERoundtable
Does “GoogleClick” Spell The End For Bid Managers? – Search Engine Land
New Google AdWords Dashboard Looks Like Yahoo Panama – Search Engine Journal
Google Ads Tracking Mouse-Over – Google Blogoscoped
How to lower your AdWords minimum bid – eWhisper.net

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Faster, Simplified Online Customer Checkout – YSM Blog
Upgrades and Enhancements – YSM Blog
Punctilious Punctuation – YSM Blog
Despite Panama, Yahoo Earnings Fall 11 Percent — Investments Blamed – Search Engine Land

Microsoft adCenter

adCenter Quality-Based Ranking – adCenter Blog
adCenter’s New Quality Based Ranking has Issues – PPC Discussions

General Pay Per Click

Ad Copy that Increases Conversion or Click Through Rate – eWhisper.net
PPC, the Classic Geo-Targeted Mix – aimClear
Google, Yahoo Speaking More Freely on Click Fraud – Search Engine Watch

Search Engine Strategies PPC Roundup

Kevin Gibbons — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 23:57:00 +0000

I’m not quite sure where to start this week as my FeedReader seems to have been overflowing with news from Search Engine Stategies over the last few days. I’ve picked out the main PPC stories from SES New York in addition to the rest of this weeks pay per click news.

Search Engine Strategies

Meet the Search Ad Networks – Bruce Clay
Advanced Paid Search Techniques – Bruce Clay
Ads In A Quality Score World – SERoundtable
In House Big PPC – SERoundtable
Getting Traffic From Contextual Ads – SERoundtable
Landing Page Testing & Tuning – SERoundtable
Creating Compelling Ads – SERoundtable
Auditing Paid Listings & Click Fraud Issues – Bruce Clay
Web Analytics & Measuring Success – Bruce Clay
Admitted: “We Do Arbitrage” – Traffick
Microsoft adCenter: Today and Tomorrow – SERoundtable
Video Recap and Reflections on SES – New York 2007 – Pepperjam Blog

This Weeks other PPC news:

Google AdWords

The next step in Google advertising – Official Google Blog
A new case study on botnet-based click fraud – Inside AdWords
Improve your account performance with expert help – Inside AdWords
Reach and Frequency reporting now available – Inside AdSense
Using AdWords for Keyword Research – Link Building Blog
Google Releases Detailed Content Network Reports – Marketing Pilgrim
Use Google AdWords & AdSense Distribution Data to Broker Direct Ad Deals – SEO Book
Increase Conversion Rates with the Google Website Optimizer? – Marketing Pilgrim
There are Inconsistencies in Google Adwords Minimum Bid Prices – PPC Lab
Will Similar Google AdWords Campaigns Affect Display of Ads? – SERoundtable
Why Do Google AdSense and Google Analytics Impressions Differ So Much? – SERoundtable

Microsoft adCenter

Microsoft adCenter and Superpages to use Quality Score – eWhisper.net
MSN adCenter Update Coming Soon – Search Engine Watch

General PPC

Turn Your PPC Advertising Campaign Into An Effective Search Marketing Machine – Search Engine Land
The first 100 impressions: What your paid keywords can tell you – Marketing Pilgrim
Thomson provides PPC buying to listings customers – e-consultancy

PPC Weekly Roundup – 07/04/2007

Kevin Gibbons — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 05:11:00 +0000

Here are the main stories from the world of PPC over the past 7 days:

Google AdWords

Google confirm two changes to how top ads are displayed and make Website Optimizer available to all.
Brad Geddes discusses what determines the ‘Account Quality Score’, ‘AdGroup Quality Score’ and ‘Keyword Quality Score’ for AdWords?
John Battelle reports that AOL are to launch white label AOL-only AdWords system on Monday.
Jennifer Slegg starts a new blog with some great early posts such as Targeting keyword variations for increased search & pay per click traffic, Using dynamic keyword insertion in AdWords URLs for higher click throughs and How to Brand with Google AdWords & Pay Per Click.
Vinny Lingham posts about Google’s new metric: Impression Share.
Search Engine Guide takes a look Inside Google’s New Pay Per Action for Advertisers.
SERoundtable posts about Google entering TV market with TV commercial trial.
And the Inside AdSense blog confirms some fresh, new look AdSense ads.

Yahoo! Search Marketing

The YSM Blog confirm that short ad descriptions will be required from May, they also post an intro to finding your editorial status.

Microsoft adCenter

The adCenter blog this week talks about capitalizing the display URL in adCenter, Integrating your offline marketing efforts with an online strategy and the release of a new Microsoft adCenter welcome guide.

General PPC

Andrew Goodman takes a look at multivariate landing page testing.
SERoundtable cover the launch of Yell’s own PPC advertising solution.

There may be a couple of items I missed as I’m catching up at the moment after getting back to the UK yesterday. After going back 17 hours from Sydney to LA and then forward another 8 hours to GMT I’m still trying to work out which timezone I’m in at the moment, up at 4.30am today so I probably should be somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic at the moment! :)

PPC Weekly Roundup – 31/03/2007

Kevin Gibbons — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 15:52:00 +0000

Here’s this weeks collection of PPC news:

Google AdWords
Pay-per-action beta — your questions answered – Inside AdWords
AdWords Editor’s “Top 10 Favorites” – Inside AdWords
The Guide to Creating AdWords Pay Per Action Campaigns – eWhisper.net
AdSense Publisher View Of Google Pay Per Action – Search Engine Land
Is There a Doman Wide Quality Score in Google AdWords? – Search Engine Roundtable

Yahoo! Search Marketing
Yahoo’s Panama ad platform will launch in UK / Europe in Q02 – JenSense
Judge Approves Yahoo Click Fraud Settlement – Search Engine Watch
You Complete Me – Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog

Microsoft adCenter
Ad Titles and Dynamic Text – adCenter Blog

PPC
E-Consultancy Offers Paid Search Briefing – Search Engine Land
PPC And Your Good Name: Sales From Brand Searches Aren’t Incremental – Search Engine Land
Does “Set It & Forget It” Still Work In The PPC Game? – Search Engine Roundtable
Things You Shouldn’t Care About in PPC – PPC Discussions
Yes, Co-managed PPC And SEO Campaigns Work – MediaPost Search Insider
Google & Yahoo Ranking Look at Domains Rather Than Individual Pages – Search Engine Journal

PPC Weekly Roundup – 23/03/2007

Kevin Gibbons — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 08:17:00 +0000

Here is this weeks roundup of pay per click news:

Google AdWords
Pay-Per-Click Beta Test – Inside AdWords
Google Launches Pay Per Action Ads – Search Engine Land
AdWords Optimization Tips: Part 3 – Account Structure – Inside AdWords
AdWords and AdSense: a perfect pair Inside AdSense
Google’s New Text Link Ad Unit – Search Engine Roundtable
Adsense to be Completely Replaced by Pay-Per-Action? – Search Engine Roundtable

Yahoo! Search Marketing
Panama Ad Ranking Algo Explained – Search Engine Watch
Yahoo Steps Up Click Fraud Efforts – Search Engine Watch
Quality is His New Job, For One – Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog

Microsoft adCenter
Get Help Uploading Your Campaigns into Microsoft adCenter with QuickLaunch – adCenter Blog
New adCenter tool for determining page sensitivity – JenSense

General PPC
Buy Branded Keywords? A Case Study on Traffic, Conversion and RPV – Jonathan Mendez

It’s quite possible I missed a couple of stories from the world of pay per click as I’ve been away for most of this week, so please feel free to post any links in the comments section.

PPC Links – Weekly Recap

Kevin Gibbons — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 08:19:00 +0000

Here’s a collection of this weeks PPC links from around the blogosphere:

Google AdWords

Google AdWords are looking for more testers for audio ads.
Google AdWords click-to-play ads are now available in the UK.
Here are some instructions about how to export your Google AdWords campaign.
Invites are being sent out to test CPC for site-targeting.
SFGate.com write about how Google’s AdWords confuses transgender terms with teen porn.

Yahoo! Search Marketing

The Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog talks about how you can assign different user roles using Panama.
Search Engine Roundtable asks is a perfect quality score in Yahoo! Search Marketing possible?

Microsoft adCenter

Microsoft adCenter released a Content Ads Webinar.

PPC

Shoemoney posts some landing page tips.
Andrew Goodman writes for Search Engine Land’s new paid search column, titled paid search back-checks, slays dragons, asks for little in return.
Another Search Engine Land article looks at the 5 secret PPC agencies don’t want you to know.
Jonathan Mendez posts 5 lessons from multivariate tests on Google PPC ads.
And I asked should you pause PPC campaigns while on holiday?

PPC News – Weekly Roundup

Kevin Gibbons — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 22:39:00 +0000

Here’s a weekly roundup of this weeks PPC news:

There will be a PPC webcast next week from Search Marketing Now.
JenSense spots Google AdWords testing a yellow background on ads above the search results.
Google confirm that click fraud is 0.02% of all clicks.
Search Engine Roundtable reports that Canadian companies are invited to be Google AdWords Qualified Professionals.
The Inside AdWords follows up it’s AdWords optimisation tips post about assessing your industry and audience with part two assessing your website and goals.
Google are to share it’s list of content partners in the next few months.
There are reports of paused Google AdWords ads still running.
Yahoo! Search Marketing bids remain $0.10 but grandfathered bids are removed.
And Microsoft adCenter beta is now open to everyone.

Last week I wrote a recap post about recent Google AdWords news, this is something I plan to do more of in the future to cover any PPC news I may have missed (or just not blogged about) during the week.

Microsoft adCenter online seminar

Kevin Gibbons — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 08:33:00 +0000

Microsoft adCenter are running an online seminar for an hour next Wednesday at 8:30am (US Pacific Time).

Here are the webcast event details:

“If you feel that your marketing efforts are vanishing into cyberspace, join this webcast to see how Microsoft adCenter can help you develop ads to target the audience you want. This session provides real-world examples of successful advertising campaigns that have benefited from the powerful demographic-targeting capabilities within adCenter. We share case studies, demonstrations, and tips on how you can apply similar techniques to your own advertising campaigns using Microsoft adCenter demographics and Microsoft adCenter Labs research tools. View this webcast to discover how to reach your potential customers and increase your return on investment.”

Common PPC Mistakes

Kevin Gibbons — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 00:39:00 +0000

WebProNews author Igor Mordkovich this week wrote an excellent article containing a list of 17 common PPC mistakes.

The article gives a description of each of these but here are the 17 points:
1. Bidding Broad
2. Fighting for #1 Spot
3. Avoiding Geo-targeting
4. Losing Relevance on Landing Page
5. Getting Rid of Fraud Networks
6. Being Boring
7. Using Telephone Numbers
8. Not Bidding for Your Name
9. Lack of Affiliate Control
10. Not Separating Content Match from Search Results
11. Ignoring the Seasonal Copy
12. Lack of “Exact Tracking”
13. Paying for Negative Keywords
14. Mistaking CTR with conversion rate when testing ads
15. Not Using Keywords in Ad Copy
16. Not Calling Google
17. Avoiding Brand Name Keywords

PPC Advertising SES Sessions

Kevin Gibbons — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 03:22:00 +0000

Search Engine Roundtable is covering the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago this week, below are some quotes and links to the sessions about PPC advertising.

Compare & Contrast: Ad Program Strategies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft)
Brad Geddes talks about the similarities and differences of Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter:
“Google AdWords supports over 200 countries, with 27 regional targeting options.
Microsoft adCenter supports 200 countries but only shows ads in 4 countries but they will role out more as time goes on. Geographic targeting is determined at the order level (ad group level). He then shows screen shots, all customers (all of the world) or you can select countries or regions.
Yahoo Search Marketing “Panama” is only available in the US now. 23 countries available, DMA targeting (US only), one account per country. Each country may have different editorial considerations. He then shows screen shots from the US based advertisers. You can select entire market versus regions (entire market is a country). You can drill down to state, region, etc and it shows you a highlighted map with your selection. They do have a zip code search, but it is not radius, it just shows you regions that are in or close to that zip code.”

Ad Testing: Research and Findings:
Anton Konikov from Acronym Media’s presentation about advanced topics with testing:
“Covering the fundamentals of ad testing: where can you test? Google and MSN both allow for multiple ad creative testing, where Yahoo has not in the past. Google and MSN both allow for multiple ad creative testing, where Yahoo has not in the past. However Yahoo! Panama will alow for this. He said that they would have to run ads over a certain period of time and then change them. He discussed key metrics: Click-Through-Rate (CTR) allows you to know how attractive the ad or offering is, and which messaging is more effective at driving traffic. Conversion rate is a more desirable metric, and should be tracked by keyword.”

Ads in a Quality Score World:
Josh Stylman from Reprise Media talks about the Google AdWords quality score:
“How is industry defining “quality score?” Method was originally defined by Google. Shows some historical context explaining how PPC started with GoTo. Started with the simple rule that “whoever pays most is #1.” There were analogies to the financial services market since you knew what your competitor pays. “Thank Google” for introducing idea of CPC X CTR, which made advertisers become more aware of the copy they produced, as well as forced bid management. Why did G change the auction? Control over #1 position, minimized less relevant ads, and of course maximized G’s revenue.”

Pay Per Percentage of Impressions Advertising

Kevin Gibbons — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 06:54:00 +0000

Bill Slawski has posted on the SEO by the Sea blog about a new pay per percentage patent filed by Microsoft. This follows Bill’s Search Engine Watch post from earlier this year about Ending Click Fraud with Pay-Per-Percentage. Maybe Microsoft adCenter will be the first to test the new pricing model in an attempt to combat click fraud?

“A new patent application from Microsoft, and Joshua Goodman, covers the same topic as the paper, Pay-Per-Percentage of Impressions: An Advertising Method that is Highly Robust to Fraud (pdf), but goes into more detail on how such a system could be implemented.”

Microsoft adCenter dynamic keyword insertion

Kevin Gibbons — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:23:00 +0000

The Microsoft adCenter blog yesterday posted about using dynamic text in adCenter with {keyword}, {param1}, {param2}, and {param3} instead of {KeyWord: Default Text} which the Google AdWords keyword insertion uses.

“There are many possibilities for using keyword insertion and dynamic text (parameters) in adCenter. This post will address the most common use of the different types of dynamic text insertion options.

Keyword Insertion
Keyword insertion helps make ads more relevant by inserting the search query term into the ad title or text.

Tip: The keyword is inserted into the ad exactly how you enter it in the interface, so capitalize words where appropriate.
Tip: Keywords have a maximum of 100 characters.
Tip: If using {Keyword} insertion causes the ad title or text to be longer than allowed lengths (title: 25 characters, text: 70 characters), the ad will be rejected. As a solution to this, have a 2nd static ad that does not use {Keyword} insertion in the order as a default. When the keyword is too long, adCenter will display the static ad.”

UK Microsoft adCenter promo codes

Kevin Gibbons — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 00:29:00 +0000

I’ve just tried registering for Microsoft adCenter using the $200 voucher but this isn’t accepted because I have a UK credit card (despite selecting a US dollar currency account set-up).

It appears that so far there aren’t any UK MSN adCenter promotion codes available, with all current vouchers only valid for US users, if I find any UK codes I’ll post them here.