Archive for the 'Search Engine Advertising' Category

Customers are right, you’re wrong

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

You know your products and services inside and out. This knowledge can be a critical challenge when communicating with customers. They may not be experts, or they have a perspective and terminology that’s different from yours. The good folks over at SPOS recently wrote about this and gave an excellent example: Customer language is often [...]

SEM bidding and traffic increase nonlinearity

Friday, December 11th, 2009

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 [...]

FIXED: Bug in Microsoft adCenter geo-targeting

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

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 [...]

First look at AdWords Ad Sitelinks

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

We have been granted access to the Ad Sitelinks beta in Google AdWords for one of our clients. This new feature, which was announced on the Inside AdWords blog two days ago, provides advertisers in the top spot with the ability to show additional keyword links in their ads as shown in the example below. [...]

Bug in Microsoft adCenter geo-targeting

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

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 [...]

Why and how to tag links

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

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 [...]

10 AdWords setup tips

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Here is a quick checklist of commonly missed tasks that should be undertaken when setting up an AdWords account and new AdWords campaigns. Determine if you’ll use pre-pay or post-pay. We only recommend pre-pay for those cases where you need precise control over the total budget consumed over the life of a campaign. Note that [...]

Do you know where your ads are? AdCenter’s Publisher Placement Report

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

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 [...]

DoubleClick Ad Exchange expands Google’s content network

Friday, September 18th, 2009

Google has just announced DoubleClick Ad Exchange and provided more details for advertisers in the AdWords Blog. For advertisers, this means more sites will be available through the content network, many of them large, marquee brands that were previously difficult to reach for many small advertisers. Ad space purchased through the DoubleClick Ad Exchange will [...]

adCenter provides ad preview feature

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

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 [...]