Internet Marketing Blog

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

After recent news from Yahoo Sponsored Search and Microsoft adCenter that both programs are shifting to draconian trademark protection policies, it is a quite refreshing to hear Google breathe some reason back into search advertising. For years trademark owners have objected to the use of their marks in competitive advertisments, some going so far as […]

Increasing bids in a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) / search engine advertising campaign improves ad position, which usually increase the number of impressions and clicks. However, if you have a fixed daily budget that is always being spent, you will get more clicks if you decrease bids. Here’s why: The total number of clicks you can get […]

Yahoo! has just announced new ways to target particular users: Demographic Targeting Ad Scheduling Enhanced ZIP-level geo-targeting All of the big three search engines have been offering some version of geographic targeting for some time. Yahoo! finally added rich scheduling functionality, a lot like that offered by AdWords. Microsoft adCenter has offered demographic targeting for […]

This post was prompted by many discussions with clients in which we attempt to summarize SEO and PPC performance in practical, easily digestible forms. There is frequently a tendency for clients to oversimplify evaluations to “it works” or “it doesn’t” based upon summary data. For SEO, we try to summarize performance in terms of increases […]