SEOptimise » microsoft

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.

BingHoo? Recap of the Yahoo/Microsoft Search Agreement!

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:30:16 +0000

We don’t always cover search industry news as we’d rather not just repeat what the other blogs are saying. Today’s a bit different though, the story of Microsoft and Yahoo!’s new 10-year search agreement deal is massive news!

Image credit: gnal

In case you’ve managed to miss it, here’s the latest news from around the blogosphere:

It’s Finally Official, Microsoft & Yahoo Make A Deal, Yahoo Gives Up On Search – Search Engine Land
Live Blogging The MSFT – YHOO Search Press Conference – Search Engine Land
Microsoft, Yahoo Search Deal is Official – Search Engine Journal
Yahoo Search Powered By Microsoft Bing: What SEMs Need To Know – Search Engine Roundtable
Five things you need to know about the Yahoo/Microsoft deal – Brand Republic
Does Bing/Yahoo Click-Through beats Google’s? – Search Cowboys
Microsoft and Yahoo seal web deal – BBC

And here’s the agreement and videos from Choicevalueinnovation.com – a website launched to break the news.

How will this affect the search industry? In a nutshell, it’s now confirmed that Yahoo.com as a portal will be powered by Bing and Yahoo Search Marketing will be merged into Microsoft adCenter. But there’s lots more to think about too and I’ve given my thoughts about this to the search experts react to the Yahoo / Microsoft deal post on Econsultancy (just before the news broke) and Search Cowboys:

“This is a huge deal & boost for Bing. It instantly increases their market share & consolidates Yahoo & Microsoft into a far stronger competitor to Google. It’s great news for PPC advertisers too, as they can justify spending time/budget on a second paid search platform now instead of just using AdWords.”

For all of the comments from myself and other search industry professionals please read the Econsultancy and Search Cowboys posts.

Don’t worry though, you should have time to prepare – it’s going to take about 2 years until they’re ready! ;)

Live Search launches Google Sitelinks

Patrick Altoft — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:29:59 +0000

Microsoft has proudly announced the addition of something that looks very similar to Google sitelinks to their search results.

In fact if I was Google I would be digging out the patent they have that shows how these results are generated and thinking hard about whether to challenge how Microsoft is doing this.

One commenter put it quite well after the announcement:

Wasn’t the process you went through more like this?

1/ We looked at what Google were doing

2/ We copied it

Do I Really Need to Perform SEO for My Website?

Andy MacDonald — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:46:08 +0000

This question may seem like a no-brainer, but actually, the answer is not necessarily yes in all circumstances. If any of the following examples apply to you’re website, you may not be in need of an search engine optimization campaign right now:

You have a website that you really don’t want strangers to find, such as a training tool for your employees, a classroom tool for your students or some sort of communications platform/blog which is intended for employee’s or family members only.
You already have a website which is ranking well, and you’re fully satisfied with your sales, website conversions, and incoming inquiries, and you don’t want to rock the boat.
You’re in a big hurry—say, you’ll go out of business without a major upswing in revenue in the next couple of months. This is not to say that SEO can’t help you, but good SEO takes time. You may need to focus your energies elsewhere right now.
Your site is going to be completely rebuilt or redesigned in the next couple of months. If that’s the case, be sure to incorporate SEO tactics from the outset. Anybody can have a go at SEO, and i would always encourage you to do some research and try the SEO for your site yourself, but if you really don’t have the time, and want your new website in expert hands, consider hiring an SEO agency to work with your web designer from the outset.

It is a rare site indeed that couldn’t use a little improvement in the SEO department. And, with the importance of SEO on the rise, if you don’t need it today, it’s a good bet you’ll need to brush up your SEO smarts for tomorrow.

Guest post by Andy MacDonald from Swift Media UK.

Live.com Link Command Now Treated As Regular Search

Kevin Gibbons — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 19:45:00 +0000

If you now perform a link: command search on Windows Live/MSN/Live.com, or whatever it’s called, you now get a list of regular search results instead.

I’ve just noticed a search for link:http://www.live.com appearing in the website stats as my original post about the Live.com link command being broken is currently ranking at number one for this, maybe it’s worth optimising for link searches too now to get some extra traffic!

Live.com link: command search broken?

Kevin Gibbons — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 13:31:00 +0000

The live.com backlink search seems to be broken at the moment, any link: command query, for example link:http://www.msn.com is bringing up the following error:

“XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2F
www.msn.com&mkt=en-gb&FORM=LVCP&go.x=23&go.y=12&go=Search
Line Number 1, Column 1:”

Google, Yahoo and MSN standardised sitemaps

Kevin Gibbons — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 12:30:00 +0000

Google, Yahoo and MSN yesterday officially agreed to all support the sitemap 0.90 protocol, for more information please read the search engines united story at the official Google blog.