Internet Marketing Blog

A long time ago, we wrote briefly about how higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR) values aren’t always desirable, and our clients often ask how to best interpret the significance of CTR.
CTR is literally defined as the percentage of people who viewed an ad that clicked on it.  For example, if an ad is shown 100 times and [...]

Microsoft and Yahoo! have received regulatory approval for their “search alliance” in which Microsoft will provide search and advertising on Yahoo’s websites. Details are being revealed at http://advertising.microsoft.com/search-alliance/home.
Advertisers do not need to take any actions right now, as the integration is not likely to take place before late in 2010, and we assume that they [...]

Even PPC campaigns that have an Impression Share (IS) of nearly 100% can get more traffic by increasing bids. What happens when you do so? Will doubling bids result in twice the traffic? No, and here’s why.
If you increase your bids, your ads will show up higher and will get both more impressions and higher [...]

In a prior post we described a problem in Microsoft adCenter’s geo-targeting feature. Today we learned that the bug has been fixed, and we were able to verify it through the interface and web analytics. It is now possible to exclude all of any state. We have no examined how this affects metropolitan areas that [...]

Original Post, October 28, 3:27 PST
Double check your geographic targeting in Microsoft adCenter! We have encountered and reproduced a bug with a support representative in which selecting specific US states for inclusion/exclusion does not get saved. More specifically, we have a US campaign that we switched from national targeting to do so by state so [...]

When you create online advertising of any kind, it is possible to “tag” the ads in a way that website analytics software like Google Analytics and WebTrends can provide additional information about these traffic sources.  For example, tagging can make it possible to tell exactly which ad among several provides the most online purchases or [...]

Just last week we looked at Yahoo’s Ad Placement Report, how it can help optimize your Yahoo PPC campaigns and how discloses the huge number of sites included as part of the Yahoo Search network. Does Microsoft adCenter offer a similar report? Yes, the Publisher Placement Performance report.

Running the report is extremely easy. Access it [...]

Finally Microsoft adCenter has an ad preview feature so that you can see if your ad is appearing in Bing, and how it will look. The tool only works from within the Campaigns tab, and it doesn’t support testing by location (yet). You also can’t click on the ad to test it, so there’s no [...]

Over the years we have managed a lot of pay-per-click campaigns for a variety of clients. Some of them have a thorough understanding of conversions, while there are still a lot that don’t. It is still surprising to find companies that only measure the success or failure of their AdWords campaigns (or less often Yahoo! [...]

We’ve found several bugs in Microsoft adCenter, usually related to their web interface. This is a keyword addition bug. When entering keywords, either through the online interface or CSV import, certain keyword combinations are ignored if other variations with conjunctions exist, such as those containing “for” or “on”. Example: If “butter for toast” has been [...]