Microsoft adCenter Community

Manual Pause vs. Budget Pause

Sarah Reagan - MSFT — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:36:00 GMT

Have you ever logged into adCenter to find that your account is on ‘budget pause’ and wondered “WHY?! Why does this keep happening”? Well read on to find out why!

adCenter has two ways to put campaigns on pause. With manual pause, you can pause the campaign by checking the box to the left of the campaign name and then selecting “Pause campaign” from the Actions drop down menu:

In this case, you’re in control. When you would like the campaign to resume, simply check the box to the left of the campaign again, but this time you’ll select “Resume campaign” from the Actions drop down menu. Your campaign will go back to an ‘Active’ status and your ads will begin to display again.

The other way for a campaign to be paused is what’s called “Budget pause”. In this case, adCenter has automatically placed your campaign on pause due to budget restraints. For example, let’s say you have a monthly budget of $1,500.00. If you have chosen to ‘spend until depleted’ and you have spent your entire budget by the 25^th of that month, adCenter will put that campaign on budget pause since you have no more money to spend for the month.

Your campaign can also go on budget pause on a daily basis, if you have chosen ‘divide across the month’ as your budgeting option. Using the $1,500.00 per month example, if you are spending $50.00 a day, adCenter will put your campaign into budget pause for the rest of the day so you will not overspend your monthly budget. If you find that your daily spend* is averaging more than your monthly budget divided by 30, adCenter will not refund you that amount. On the other hand, if your monthly budget has overspent by the end of the month, then adCenter will automatically refund you for the overage. For example, the monthly budget below is $1,876.93 and the campaign spent a total of $1,896.69. adCenter will refund the account $19.76.

Understanding the different pause features in adCenter can help you keep your campaigns running smoothly. Good luck with your campaigns!

*If you find that your campaign is going over the daily spend frequently, consider lowering your daily spend amount by 15% and it should average out to be pretty accurate so you don’t deplete your monthly budget prematurely.

Jim Sterne Interview at eMetrics San Francisco 2008

Mel Carson - MSFT — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:19:00 GMT

I caught up with Jim Sterne at the eMetrics Summit last week in San Francisco and asked him how the conference got started and who it is aimed at. I then asked about the buzzwords I'd been hearing about - "segmentation" & "actionability" - what did they mean? How should marketers and website owners be employing these methods & tactics to increase business success.

One of the measurements Jim talks about a lot is "how do people feel when they come to your site?" This really strikes me as pertinent as analytics is not just about numbers but a combination of metrics which Jim talks about in more detail in the interview......

Demographic Targeting - Is it right for you?

Rob Brautigam - MSFT — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Are you an advertiser who knows what your high converting customers look like? Or, are you specifically targeting a certain age or gender for the product or website you’re promoting with search? If you knew that someone in your target demographic was sitting at the computer, wouldn’t you be willing to pay a bit more for your ad placement with that customer? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may be a prime candidate to utilize the demographic targeting feature available in adCenter. This allows you to maximize presentation of your ads to your target demographic by paying a premium on your bid for those customers whom you know are likely to convert.

How does it work?

The data used for the demographic targeting option (age and gender) comes from information reported by MSN customers; this data in Microsoft adCenter is retrieved through the online advertising audience's Windows Live IDs. If you have targeted your ad to Females using the incremental bid or "bid boost" option in adCenter, you can increase your bid in increments of 10% up to 100% for the demographic you’ve identified as your "sweet spot". So, if you’ve chosen 10%, your $2 Max CPC bid becomes $2.20 when adCenter is able to recognize this information about a logged-in user. With this strategy in place, you're likely improving your position for your target customer and increasing the right traffic to your site.

Important note: Incremental bid boosts are additive so if you’ve elected to bid 10% for Female and 20% for 30-39, you’ll be increasing your bid by 30% for someone who falls into both categories using their non-identifiable label.

How do I implement this strategy?

Select the ad group you'd like to apply demographic targeting to. On the Manage selected ad group page, under Set incremental bids for targeting, click Bid for location, day, time, age, or gender. Under Demographics, select the additional amount you want to bid to target by age group or gender, in 10 percent increments above your keyword bid amount. Click Save. You’ll be off and running in targeting the right customers to maximize your bid for.

If this strategy is implemented correctly, you could increase your conversions, increase your CTR, and boost your ROI! Good luck.

ReportAggregation.Summary Value Update: TimePeriod Column Removed

Chris Norred - MSFT — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:25:00 GMT

An update to the adCenter API was recently released to allow the ReportAggregation.Summary value to pull the aggregate reports without the TimePeriod column required.

We removed this extra column in the ReportAggregation.Summary value to help streamline your report request and simplify the data we need to create your report.

To use this updated value, you will need to remove the TimePeriod column from the ReportAggregation.Summary value. If you submit the ReportAggregation.Summary value with the TimePeriod column still in place, you may receive a 2034 error message: “The specified report request contains a TimePeriod column which is incompatible with the requested Summary report aggregation. Please submit a report request with valid report columns for a summary report.”

It is important to note that the TimePeriod is still required for all other reports. This only applies to the ReportAggregation.Summary value.

Please let us know if you have questions.

-Chris

Meet The Team: NY Search Media Team Part 2

Jason Yormark — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:41:00 GMT

While in NY for SES 2008, I had the chance to sit down with a few members of our NY account teams and discuss their backgrounds, client experiences, and insights as to how they service their clients and what they see for Microsoft in online advertising down the road. In Part 2 of this series, I sat down with Kunal Das, Faye Marie Trapani, & Sumit Shukla, all Search Media Strategists and Analysts.

Research Your Way To Business Success

Mel Carson - MSFT — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:01:00 GMT

I’ve written a couple of posts on the Analytics Blog about the eMetrics Summit I’ve been attending in San Francisco over the last few days. Although the conference has a lot of analytics content it is very much about how we manage business success. By deciding what success might look like, you can then take steps to understand what your customers are doing before, during and after they come to your site.

Now pay-per-click on its own serves as a way to get users quickly and efficiently to your site. You bid on relevant keywords, write relevant ads, you get a good click-through-rate and traffic starts coming to your site.

But there’s much analysis you can do before you even kick off the campaign to ensure that you have optimised it before you even pay a penny.

Use the Research Tab in adCenter or the Excel Add-In to do some really thorough keyword research. By thorough I’m not just talking about generating similar KWs or knowing how much traffic you might get. I mean diving a little deeper into the data. Have some goals in mind. You might want to sell more products or you might want to generate more leads. Whatever your goals, make sure you research your keywords with any business limitations in mind. For instance if you only deliver to a certain geographical area, make sure you know what the geographical make-up of that KW or KW group is. You may find that most people looking for that product or service live too far away, so then you have a couple of choices. You can exclude that geographic region when you set up your campaign or you can take steps in order to enable your business to deliver to that location.

Checking out traffic trends over the week can be very helpful too. Some KWs may get more searches at the weekend. Now your business might depend on a real conversation with a real person to close a transaction and your office may not be open at the weekend. In order to limit potential negative branding, you could turn off your campaign at the weekend, or alternatively as I talked about a couple weeks ago, you could get more creative with your ad copy.

Finally, seeing which age and gender bucket your KWs fall under can be very interesting because the report sometimes throws up some surprises which you can latch onto and capitalise on. If you know that a keyword’s demographic data is biased towards women aged 18-24, your ad copy and landing page text would need to be very different than if you discovered the KWs you were about to bid on were being search for predominantly by men aged 65+. What you think your product's target demographic is might be very different from the demographic that actually buys it. A new jewellery design for instance may be targeted at women, but it may be men who are looking to buy it for their wife or girlfriend as a present.

Thinking laterally and doing some in-depth research and analysis before you start building a campaign can help reduce cost and improve initial return on investment. By setting some business goals and giving yourself the best possible chance of achieving success right out of the gate, you're helping to positively build your own brand, as your customers will receive a much better user experience.

Backing Up Your Data

Mel Carson - MSFT — Tue, 06 May 2008 22:49:00 GMT

One of the overriding theme of this analytics conference is using data to back up assumptions.

eBay did a very good presentation this morning about how their marketing teams research their customer-base through focus groups, usability studies, lab testing and even home visits. They actually send teams into people’s houses to watch eBayers at work in their own environment and in their own time. This kind of approach might yield a small sample, they’re never going to be able to canvas all 276m buyers and sellers, but it gives them something to go on when assessing a new feature, bell or whistle.

They then back up these what they find through detailed analytics and testing, processing many petabytes (!) of data in doing so.

The secret sauce seems to be a combined approach to improving the user experience and in turn increasing ROI and profitability.

You have to ask questions of the data you collect, but sometimes it’s difficult to know where to start. By asking your customers via traditional methods like surveys and suchlike, they can provide you with the ideas of how to interrogate and navigate your analytics reports to discover patterns which you can then work on to optimise or eradicate.

Competing On Analytics at eMetrics 2008

Mel Carson - MSFT — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:57:00 GMT

I’m at the eMetrics Summit here in San Francisco and it’s struck me how passionate people here are about data. But it isn’t any ordinary data they’re passionate about reflecting on. It’s data that they manage to put some sort of context around. Context turns that data into information and as one speaker so eloquently put it, “with robust analysis and good controls we can turn that information into actionable insight.”

The keynote speech today was by Tom Davenport author of Competing On Analytics – The New Science of Winning.

He opened by admitting he was no spring chicken, certainly not hip and that his children would not befriend him on Facebook. But what he’d noticed was, that as the conference had grown over the years, he'd found that there were more and more people like him attending. What he was getting at was web analytics was finally no longer the preserve of the young hip "web crowd" and that it was becoming more and more mainstream.

The premise of his speech was taking a look at how big businesses were not only using analytics to understand user behaviour on their site and increase sales, but they’re now using it to compete in their respective markets and not just online either.

Real analytics should be where we optimise websites and businesses based on a statistical model, where we understand why users are behaving the way they do, enabling us to forecast and be able to say what the website or business should actually look like in the future.

He argued that businesses should make analytics and fact-based decisions a key element of their online strategies. In other words using data gleaned from analytics is a must, but decisions should not be made unless they are backed up by the outcomes of that data, and not just a "gut feel" approach.

This online approach has thrown up all sorts of new ways to do business offline too. The way we analysis, segment and organise information from the web can be applied to offline business enablement too.

He cited Harrahs, Marriott, Capital One and Tesco as perfect examples of how companies have integrated analytics into a multi-channel approach. They use loyalty, service, web analytics, revenue management, promotions, online shopping, call centres and branches to glean information and paint a very real picture of not only what is being done now and in the past, but also what should be done in the future.

He said that coupon redemption in the US is less than 1%, however Tesco, using its customer data via loyalty cards, manages to get 30-50% of its customers back into the store to receive discounts on products targeted to them.

So how do these big companies do it?

Well they have three main traits:

They capture the data.
They are enterprising, centralising expertise and applying a multi-channel strategy for a multi-channel organisation.
They have great leadership – the fervour for actionable analytics filter down through the company from above.

To round off he gave some "must do's" in order to stay ahead of the game in this brave new world:

Develop a test and learn culture
Think “multi-channel analytics”
Find unique metrics relevant to your business
Stop commodity reporting
Spread the analytics gospel around your organisation

Of course you don't need to have a market cap of several billion dollars to apply these tips to your own business.

Internet analysis tools can teach us an awful lot about what kinds of business decisions we should be making.

A simple report on potential search traffic while researching for a PPC campaign can tell you much about how to get people quickly and efficiently to your site. Taking a look at the demographic segments interacting with your homepage can give you incredible insight into the age, gender and geographic location of your users and you may be suprised what that picture really looks like.

With a few choice data decisions you can compete, you just have to make time for it!

Mother's Day: Create Seasonal Campaigns to Evaluate Performance

Tina Kelleher - MSFT — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:22:00 GMT

If there’s one thing a woman appreciates the most in a Mother’s Day gift, it’s thoughtfulness. She’s going to know that you love and appreciate her no matter what you choose, but if you really want to wow her, spend some time thinking about the things she’s passionate about and how you can turn them into great gifts. Considering how varied hobbies and interests can be among mothers, grandmothers, wives and sisters, there are literally thousands of options for possible Mother’s Day gifts… and every one of them is a great reason to make sure your search campaign is ready to capture the traffic that Mother’s Day-related keywords can bring to your site.

According to a recent National Retail Federation survey, total consumer spending for Mother’s Day is projected to reach around $15.8 billion this year. The study also found that consumers intended to allocate their gift funds in a variety of different categories:

· $3.0 billion on special dinners or brunch

· $2.0 billion on flowers

· $1.6 billion on gift cards/gift certificates

· $1.4 on clothing and accessories

· $1.2 billion on electronics like digital cameras, digital photo frames and video cameras

· $1.1 billion on personal service gifts like a trip to a favorite spa or salon

· $696 million on house wares and gardening tools

· $672 million on greeting cards

Because adCenter results in an average conversion rate 70% - 80% higher than other engines, it’s well worth the effort to make sure your search campaigns are ready to capitalize on the seasonal spike in online shopping that celebrations like Mother’s Day offer.

Your first step is not to alter your existing campaigns to add in Mother’s day ad copy and keywords, but to simply create a brand new campaign designed specifically for the special occasion. Not only will you be able to evaluate its performance independently of your regular campaigns, but you’ll be able to re-use it repeatedly in years to come, always adding optimization updates based on lessons learned from previous years. This best practice applies not only to Mother's Day, but to any gift-giving occasion where searchers may be looking for the products and/or services you provide. It may seem like a daunting task to build out a new campaign for every holiday that would warrant a search campaign, but you only have to do it once and then it's just a matter of adding to and maintaining it from then on.

Once you have your campaign set up and populated with a variety of general and specific terms related to Mother's Day gift giving, you'll have to decide on what kind of bidding strategy will be right for you. If you specialize in a niche market, you may find that conservative bids work great, but in general, it's best to start off with a fairly aggressive bidding strategy as terms relating to special occasions like Mother's Day are going to be in high demand, and therefore, competitively priced. To give your campaign an edge, you may want to consider using adCenter’s incremental bidding feature. As it pertains to Mother's Day in particular, I would suggest targeting young adults aged 18-24 -- according to the afore-mentioned NRF survey, this group will spend the most on Mother’s Day, on average around $170, followed by the 25-34 year old range who typically spend on average about $153.

If you’re unfamiliar with incremental bidding, it’s a feature where you’re able to increase your bid by a percentage of your choice for people who match a demographic that you’d like to target. For example, if you’re bidding $1 for the key phrase “online gift card” and you have incremental bidding set up to boost your bid by 50% for someone in the 18-24 age range, then if someone fitting that demographic clicks on your ad, that particular click will cost $1.50. Demographic information is based on the profiles of Hotmail or Windows Live users. Searchers who do not have their profiles filled out, or who are not logged in to their accounts will not be included in incremental bidding. Depending on competitor bids, incremental bidding could help boost your position when your ads appear to those users who match the demographic targeting parameters you’ve entered.

To set incremental bidding, sign into adCenter and click through to your newly created Mother’s Day campaign, then click on the ad group you’d like to set incremental bidding for. Once you’re on the keywords tab, scroll to the bottom of your keyword list and you’ll see a section entitled “Set incremental bids for targeting”. Click the radio button that reads “Bid for location, day, time, age or gender”:

From there, simply use the drop down boxes to set the percentages you’d like for each value and click “Save” for the changes to take effect.

Good luck!

Tina Kelleher - Media Specialist

US Ad Services

Campaign Timeline Report - Track Multi-Channel Campaigns

Olivier Dabrowski - MSFT — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:14:00 GMT

If you’re running numerous advertising campaigns over various media and channels, it can be very difficult to extract and aggregate the relevant data necessary to construct a good view of your spending, the media mix, and the performance of campaigns relative to each other.

To spare you time and pain, the adCenter Analytics team decided to bring you a new visualization called the Campaign Timeline. Its main purpose is to visualize your advertising effort and campaign performance over the last 12 months.

To start this report, navigate to the Goal section from the left-hand menu bar and choose Campaign Timeline.

The reports contains two sections, detailed below:

(1) The overall view on top represents the list of all campaigns run within the last 12 months.

Each bar shown in this view represents a campaign. The color of the campaign maps to the type of media, or channel, used (check the legend below the graph for the mappings).

If you want more details about a specific campaign you can simply hover over it. Hovering displays a legend containing information relevant to that campaign: total visits, conversion, revenue, etc.

(2) The detailed view below provides you with daily details of visits and conversions for the campaigns highlighted in the overall view. This highlight can be moved by simply grabbing the associated rectangle in the overall view.

You can view the details for each of the different campaigns by simply clicking on the rectangle that depicts that campaign. The detailed view can also be navigated directly by grabbing it, and moving your mouse in the direction you want to shift your view.

For each campaign, the detailed view provides insights on how the visit and conversion trends evolved during the campaign timeframe. The red bars represent your conversions and the blue bars represent your visits. When you hover over the bars for a specific day you obtain additional information about the exact visit and conversion values for that day.

The above gives you a good overview of what was your marketing focus across the year, what your media mix looked like, and how each campaign performed on a daily basis.

So can this report provide an instant view of the performance of each campaign in relation to visits, conversions, revenue?

Yes! Simply select the "Heat Map" option from the Coloring menu and then select the metric you want to see.

You can now navigate the chart—you can view the details for the campaigns of particular interest (top conversion performers, visit under performers, etc.), you can view various metrics via the heat map, or you can switch back to campaign type to view the media mix.

You can now navigate the chart: viewing the details for the campaigns of particular interest (top conversion performers, visit under performers ...), changing heat map metric or switching back to media mix.

To start using the Campaign Timeline report you will need to have advertising campaigns defined for your profile. To start tracking advertising campaigns you can use the creation and/or importing campaign options found in the profile settings.

You can find these options by:

(1) Browsing to the profiles list

(2) Selecting "Manage" on your profile

(3) Navigating to "Manage Campaigns"

We would love to hear your thoughts on the Campaign Timeline report. Tell us what you think via comments on this post or via a post in the forum.

Register to beta test the Microsoft adCenter Desktop Beta

Carolyn Miller - MSFT — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:54:00 GMT

We wanted to remind you about our interest form where you can sign up to participate in future Beta or Pilot Programs with adCenter. One of the products we're piloting right now is the Microsoft adCenter Desktop Beta (formerly known as ACE), a campaign management application where you can manage your adCenter accounts and campaigns from your desktop.

The adCenter Desktop Beta allows you to:

Quickly navigate through your accounts.
Bulk edit multiple items at once—within or across groups of items.
Scan campaigns for editorial issues before uploading to adCenter.
Expand keywords and optimize bids with built-in keyword intelligence tools.
Upload changes to the adCenter user interface immediately with one click.

You can register for potential early access to beta test our desktop campaign management tool by filling out our interest form. When registering, be sure to click on "campaign management tools" and "yes" to sharing your feedback with Microsoft.

Meet Microsoft at eMetrics Summit San Francisco

Mel Carson - MSFT — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:56:00 GMT

There’ll be a host of Microsoft adCenter Analytics folk attending the eMetrics Summit in San Francisco from 5th to 7th May.

We’ll be working booth (number 40) on the expo floor and Esco Strong will be delivering a keynote speech on Atlas’s Engagement Mapping Technology too.

Meet The Team: US Ad Services

Jason Yormark — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:03:00 GMT

In this week's video we showcase our sit down with Charles Thrasher and Bill Bledsoe from the US Ad Services Team. Charles is currently a Project Lead with a rich history of client facing and Analytics experience. Bill Bledsoe, a Media Specialist, has an extensive API servicing background. Both share their insights with us this week on their expertise and thoughts on the industry.

Handling Large Arrays in API V5 (.NET)

Jeff Dillon - MSFT — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:41:00 GMT

When transferring large amounts of data (large arrays) in Version 5 of the API when using .NET, some changes to the client configuration may be necessary. The following elements may need to be adjusted in app.config, for example:

· MaxReceivedMessageSize

· MaxBufferSize (should be same size as MaxReceivedMessageSize)

· MaxItemsInObjectGraph

For MaxItemsInObjectGraph, a custom behavior is needed, as shown in the following configuration file snippet:

<bindings>          
    <basicHttpBinding>
        <binding name="BasicHttpBinding_ICampaignManagementService" closeTimeout="00:01:00"
            openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00"
            allowCookies="false" bypassProxyOnLocal="false" hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard"
            maxBufferSize="6553600" maxBufferPoolSize="524288" maxReceivedMessageSize="6553600"
            messageEncoding="Text" textEncoding="utf-8" transferMode="Buffered"
            useDefaultWebProxy="true">
            <readerQuotas maxDepth="32" maxStringContentLength="8192" maxArrayLength="16384"
                maxBytesPerRead="4096" maxNameTableCharCount="16384" />
            <security mode="Transport">
                <transport clientCredentialType="None" proxyCredentialType="None"
                    realm="" />
                <message clientCredentialType="UserName" algorithmSuite="Default" />
            </security>
        </binding>
       
    </basicHttpBinding>
</bindings>

<client>
    <endpoint address="https://adcenterapi.microsoft.com/Api/Advertiser/V5/CampaignManagement/CampaignManagementService.svc"
        binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="BasicHttpBinding_ICampaignManagementService"
        contract="ICampaignManagementService" name="BasicHttpBinding_ICampaignManagementService"
    behaviorConfiguration="LargeQuotaBehavior"/>           
</client>

<behaviors>
  <endpointBehaviors>
    <behavior name="LargeQuotaBehavior">
      <dataContractSerializer maxItemsInObjectGraph="2147483647"/>
    </behavior>
  </endpointBehaviors>
</behaviors>

For further information, see the following article on MSDN.

Jeff Dillon, API Support

V5 Error "Bid is less than floor price" when Updating Keyword Bids with Zeroes

Jeff Dillon - MSFT — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:01:00 GMT

When using V5 of the API, it is now possible to send nulls for object properties that should remain intact. However, when sending nulls or zeroes for bids, the system incorrectly sees the bid as less than floor price and you may see an error returned in the response message. We are hoping to resolve this issue this week.

It is ok to send nulls for other object properties in V5, as described in our MSDN API documentation :

V5 offers the ability to update campaigns, ads, ad groups, and keywords without requiring values for the properties that are not being changed. For example, you can specify new bid amounts for a keyword, but leave the Param1, Param2, Param3, Status, Text, and NegativeKeywords properties set to null when calling the UpdateKeywords method. Only the bid amounts will be changed. The keyword properties that are set to null will remain unchanged

adCenter spring upgrade: reporting updates

Carolyn Miller - MSFT — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:20:00 GMT

This past weekend the adCenter team upgraded the user interface to add some features to make it easier for customers to manage their adCenter campaigns. In our last post, we covered campaign management changes; today I wanted to share changes to the reporting section of adCenter.

When you visit the Report Center, you'll see a list of your most recent 20 reports along with an auto-updated status column so you can keep tabs as reports are created and know as soon as they're ready.

We've simplified the report creation process to make it easier to create and customize reports to help you keep a close eye on your performance and adjust your campaigns as needed. We've also made changes to available date range changes to include:

New options, including "today", as requested by customers.
The date range now defaults to "last month", or choose a different time period from the drop-down.

The report display page includes 2 enhancements to help you when viewing your data:

Mouse over column headings in your report tables to view additional information.
Longer bits of text—such as destination URLs—are now abbreviated in the display to allow for easier scanning. To view the full text, mouse over the text.

For more information, please see What's New with adCenter on advertising.microsoft.com and be sure to let us know what you think of these changes over in the discussion forum for advertisers.

API Upgrade for Editorial Validation Errors

Chris Norred - MSFT — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:33:00 GMT

We’ve recently updated the adCenter API Production and Sandbox+ environments for Version 5 to improve transparency for editorial decisions.

The EditorialApiFaultDetail.EditorialErrors property now contains any editorial validation errors. Previously, this array was always empty.

This will help you understand editorial decisions, and take action to appropriately update these ads and keywords to meet editorial guidelines.

The adCenter user interface was also upgraded this week with new and improved features each designed to give you easier, more efficient ways to use adCenter. In our upcoming monthly webcast, Shamit Patel, the API program manager, will discuss a comparison of adCenter user interface features and API features.

API Version 5 Live Meeting is schedule May 20th, at 1 p.m. Pacific time. Call-in information to join the conference call will be provided in the Live Meeting.

We will also be preparing articles for the blog to document the comparison of the adCenter UI and API features.

Reminder: Version 4 of the API will be supported for at least 100 days from today. Please continue to actively migrate your applications from Version 4 to Version 5 of the API to avoid any disruption of your service.

adCenter UI Upgrade highlights
For more about the UI upgrades,see the advertiser blog post adCenter spring upgrade: campaign management updates

Thanks

adCenter Team

adCenter spring upgrade: campaign management updates

Carolyn Miller - MSFT — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:59:00 GMT

Over the weekend the adCenter team performed an upgrade to the user interface. Here are some details about some of the features you'll be seeing when you log in, some of which came about due to feedback from our customers.

One request we've heard from you is to add performance totals to the data tables throughout adCenter – so we redesigned these tables to provide this information. You're now able to see total impressions and clicks of your campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords to help you quickly see if elements of your campaigns could use some adjustment.

Some tables dynamically display totals for your Search Ads and Content Ads campaigns as well:

We've also added more date range filters to these tables, so you can quickly scan your performance from a variety of time periods, including "today", "last 7 days", "last 3 months", "last year", etc.

You'll see changes in the campaign management area, specifically the campaign and ad groups setting pages. We've heard feedback from customers that it took too many clicks to complete tasks in adCenter, so we've streamlined these pages – you can now update your campaign settings on one page. This allows you to more easily pause or resume your campaigns, change your campaign budget settings, track conversions, and apply campaign negative keywords in a single convenient location.

Similarly, we've consolidated ad group settings into one page to make managing your ad group settings more convenient. We have also added the functionality of negative keywords at the ad group level. This option a provides a more granular setting from entering the negative keywords at the campaign level, and a more broad setting from entering negative keywords at the keyword level.

Be sure to let us know what you think of these changes over in the discussion forum for advertisers. Stay tuned tomorrow for a recap of adCenter reporting updates.

Tips for preventing your budget from exceeding prematurely

Lara Hanif - MSFT — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:32:00 GMT

Have there been days you experienced a sudden spike in impressions? Here are a couple easy ways you can protect your budget from exceeding prematurely.

1- Use Budget per Day Option:

With this new budgeting option, you can control your campaign costs by stopping ad exposure if you set a maximum daily budget limit. You can use this option when you plan on adjusting your budget frequently to take advantage of changing market conditions, such as a holiday season or special promotions.

What happens when you reach your budget daily limit?

If you reach your budget daily limit before the end of the day, all your ad groups in the campaign are paused (Budget Paused status) and ads associated with the ad groups in the campaign are no longer displayed. Your campaign will resume at the start of the next day, as long as you haven't yet reached your monthly budget limit.

Here are the steps for setting your daily budget:

Go to the Pricing page (new campaign) or Keywords tab (existing campaign).
In the drop-down list next to the Campaign budget box, select per day.
In the Campaign budget box, type your daily target amount.
In the Maximum monthly budget box, type the maximum amount you want to spend each month.

Please note that in some cases, your daily budget target may be exceeded by a small amount, but your maximum monthly budget will not be exceeded.

2- Set Negative Keywords: To avoid getting unrelated leads which could have an impact on your daily budget, I recommend adding negative keywords. Someone advertising for a window washing company might want to add negative keywords for window treatments, window replacement, etc. To identify the keywords which have generated the most leads, you’ll need to run a Keyword Performance Report which can be found in the Reports Tab within adCenter. You can then use the Keyword Research Tool, which can be found on the Research Tab within adCenter, to identify some possible negative terms that appear when searching on these keywords. The resulting keyword recommendations are created from searches on Live Search & MSN over the previous month.

3- Apply Selective Bid Management: This solution requires keeping a constant eye on your bids and making frequent adjustments when necessary. For example, if you're seeing a spike in impressions, it's possible that one or more of your search terms were listed in the "A-List Searches" box on the MSN home page (screenshot below), which may generate an unexpected flood in impressions. You can simply review the MSN home page and lower your bids for any search terms that appear both in the "A-List Searches" box and in your list of keywords.

Making Time For Web Analytics - Eat That Frog!

Mel Carson - MSFT — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:25:00 GMT

Late last year we did some research in the small business community in the UK.

The research which questioned 400 UK SMBs, revealed 62% of small businesses are not investing in search engine marketing. 44% of SMBs not doing search marketing think it is too time consuming; 56% think it is too expensive; and 33% too complicated.

However, 76% of SMBs promoting their website on search engines see an immediate increase in sales.

The research also revealed three common misconceptions:

Myth 1: Over a third (34%) of respondents think it would take a day or more to set up a campaign. In reality, the time taken from opening an account to it going live can take as little as 15 minutes.

Myth 2: Some 56% cite cost as a top reason why SMBs will not invest, with a quarter of all SMBs thinking the best keywords are already taken. Actually, SMBs can invest as little as 10-20 pence per click or a monthly budget of around £5.

Myth 3: Many are put off by the idea that it sounds too complicated – with the overwhelming majority (89%) thinking it was more difficult than online banking. However, SMBs can easily manage accounts from their desk and are likely to see immediate results from just a few simple keywords.

I guess if many of these website owners had visibility into their traffic through web analytics it might persuade them to spend a bit more time marketing them online.

If you’re thinking about trying to understand your website visitors a little better then ask yourself these questions:

How are people finding your site?

Do they come direct?
Do they come via a search engine? If so what KWs did they use?
Are they referred by another site, maybe a link from a blog that has recommended your product or service?

Who are the people visiting your site?

What age and gender are they?
Where in the world are they accessing your site from?

What are people doing once they reach your site?

Do they leave having only checked out the first page they landed on?
How deep into your site do they go?
How long did they spend on a particular page?
Did they buy, download, or sign up for anything?
Do they come back?

Answering these questions isn't difficult if your have your site tagged for an analytics. What's tricky is getting into the rhythm and the habit of pouring over the data, setting yourself goals and taking action.

One of my favourite time management books is called "Eat That Frog" by Brian Tracey:

"There's an old saying that if the first thing you do in the morning is to eat a live frog, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that it's probably the worst thing you'll do all day."

Now I'm not suggesting that web analytics is wholly unappetizing, but setting aside some time to do some reporting or analysis first thing every morning will pay dividends.

You'll find that frog slowly turns into a prince (or princess!)

Searching For The Sociable....

Mel Carson - MSFT — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Today I’m recording a video webinar here in the UK for Revolution Magazine called “Search & Social Media – Friends or Foes?”

The premise behind the debate is whether Web 2.0 and social networking are overtaking “search” as the place to find answers to everyday questions.

Whether looking for a nice hotel in Jamaica, a recipe for banana bread or how to get chewing gum out of the carpet (!), more and more of us are asking questions or looking for answers on blogs or user forums rather than searching via a search engine.

But do we always find the answers we’re looking for? Sometimes?

The other day I was having a bit of trouble with some software (not Microsoft’s!) and used Live Search to look for some help. The top result was from a forum where someone who’d had a similar problem had asked the same question. A few folks had helped him out and I was able to fix my issue. Now I could have gone straight to the forum (if I had known it existed) and asked for help outright, but it was a search engine that pointed me in the right direction. The fact that search engines index helpful forums and blog posts mean that the answer is nearly always out there – you just have to ask!

Our view is that search and social media can exist quite happily together. The web has opened up some very rich channels of feedback, communication and opinion that never existed before, and the web is growing with more and more helpful information every day.

Some research we published recently here in Europe entitled Context Matters, showed that although social media engagement has increased hugely in the past couple of years, we do have to take into account the increases in search volume. As more and more people come online and broadband speeds enable users to spend more time and engage more on the internet, so people searching for answers via traditional search engines and social media has grown too.

It also depends on the context of the user – in my case I was at work and in a hurry to find an answer so I went to Live Search for a quick resolution. If I was planning my summer holiday I may take a little more time to research in the evenings and weekends, going onto a forum or reading someone’s blog relevant to the place where I was thinking of going.
PPC can help here too, as depending where people are in their decision making, engaging with them differently at different times of the week or even day can help keep the “conversation” or the social aspect of marketing your website alive and positive.

Here are some ice-breakers to think about when advertising on adCenter or any other paid search platform:

• If your business is closed at the weekend, consider a slightly different ad or landing page on Saturdays and Sundays explaining you’ll deal with their order or call them straight back on Monday. This will establish trust and show open communication that you value their custom.

• If you know you get a lot of bookings or sell a lot of products during lunchtime Monday-Friday, why not change your ad copy between 11am – 2pm with an offer or some copy saying “Booking in your lunch break? It takes just 10 mins with us!” or words to that effect.....

• People generally tend to research at the weekends so make sure your ad copy is reflecting the call to “browse” or “compare a range” or “research” making sure your landing page enables the user to do just that.

• Run a report on which demographics is interacting with your different products or services. Very often you may be surprised by which gender or even age-range is your most dominant customer. Use this intelligence to steer the conversation to make it more male or female orientated. Folk aged 50+ may not be into “street lingo” so try and be a little less “cool” in your copy!

These are just some ideas to get your creative juices flowing, but try and think about how you’d want to be spoken to if you were looking for your site and simply apply the same colour to the conversation.

You can register for the webinar here - it'll be broadcast on 30th April at 12 noon BST

Cheers

Mel

Keyword research with the adCenter Add-in Beta for Excel 2007

Carolyn Miller - MSFT — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:12:00 GMT

To follow up on Jason's post yesterday, where he highlighted the adCenter Add-in for Excel tutorial, I just wanted to follow up and remind you of a couple of the features you can access with the Add-in.

Keyword Extraction: extract a list of popular keywords from a specified Web site.
Keyword Suggestion: generate a list of relevant keywords based on a list you provide.
Monthly Traffic: obtain monthly historical and future forecasted impression counts for keywords to gauge popularity and guide your keyword investment.
Keyword Monetization: learn about clicks, impressions, position, click through rate, cost per click, and match type for a given time period.
Search Buzz: Top Spiky Keywords (seasonality and spikes in popularity) and Top Frequent Keywords (trends for popular keywords).
Geographic: learn location information and impression info by location to help with geographic targeting.

Check out Jason's tutorial, and visit the Excel Add In page on the Microsoft Advertising site to download the Add-in and review the product guide, installation guide, FAQ and features list.

Microsoft adCenter Add In For Excel - Overview Tutorial

Jason Yormark — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:58:00 GMT

Looking for some additional keyword and optimization tools to help you better manage your advertising campaigns? Interested in a terrific solution for free? The Microsoft adCenter Add In For Excel is a great option for anyone looking for additional keyword research tools. The adCenter Add In For Excel can:

Easily and quickly build out or expand keyword lists.
Effectively plan keyword strategy based relevance, cost history, volume, demographics, geography, and more.
Forecast monthly and daily keyword impressions and future trends.

For the complete series of tutorials and to download this free software, be sure to check out the Excel Add In page on the Microsoft Advertising site today. In the meantime, check out an overview of the tool right here!

Where's My Ad? A new website can help.

Kelley Myers — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:21:00 GMT

Hi,

My name is Kelley Myers and I’m a member of the adCenter community team—and I need your help. Here at Microsoft we like to test things out—compare, iterate, noodle, and churn especially when it comes to bringing products to market. How we provide information online is no exception. I’m part of a team that is revamping how service and operational information is shared on the Microsoft advertising website.

So…to that end several folks here pulled together a bunch of articles, checklists, and videos to help our advertisers answer the question: where’s my ad? We call it a proof of concept (POC), but we’re fine with strawman, pilot, test site, or toe-in-the-water. You can find it at www.advertising.microsoft.com/go-live.

The POC came about because we also like user research—and according to research we recently conducted around the world we could do a better job of pointing you towards the right information at the right time. Whether it’s signing in, deleting keywords, or trying to sort columns on your reports—plus we’ve got some great ideas at how you can increase your conversion rates, combine campaigns and target your ads better. Add to that mix the multiple sites we own with differing log-ins…you get the picture—there is a lot of information in a lot of places.

Bottom line: we want to make it easy for you to advertise with Microsoft. We’re ready for your feedback, comments, and suggestions. Maybe you’re happy with the way stuff operates today, maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re a sophisticated user who isn’t interested in the mechanics, but you’d like to learn more about the strategy of search. Maybe you’re a small business owner who is doing it all on your own—site design, search advertising, lead generation, and marketing—and you’d like to see who else is successful and how they’re doing it. What information is important? What would you like to see?

I’d like to hear about it—I’ll use what I can to shape and build a website that is easy to navigate, offers up timely and applicable information; and sets you up for success in your advertising opportunities with Microsoft. So go check out the POC and let me know what you think. Go to our forum and post your comments.

Thanks!

KPIs: An Actionable Few

Charles Thrasher — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 03:25:00 GMT

I'd guess most of you who have web analytics configured for your site are paralyzed by reports. You're adrift in a sea of numbers, at risk of drowning; hoping management will be distracted by another colorful pie chart and not notice. Every analytic solution can generate a perfect storm of data that obliterates the horizon in innumerable details. Where's the insight? What's important? What should be done next?

Reporting isn't analysis. That's far from obvious for most of us. Our analytic tools are very good at reporting. It's a trivial effort to generate another report; it's a good deal of work to analyze the significance of the data and test your hypothesis. It's little wonder we're willing to confuse one with the other.

I'll use my own example as representative. Several years ago I was hired to run the digital advertising initiatives for a company that had pioneered digital projectors. I needed to manage eCommerce, display advertising, bulk email, SEM, the lot. I wrote specifications for web analytics and sold management on a high end solution that gleamed with more chrome than a 1949 Chevy Coupe Deluxe. The program generated an impressive number of reports which I dutifully copied and graphed and forwarded to management who dutifully ignored them. There was simply nothing they could use, nothing they could act upon.

For a metric to be useful, it must be actionable. If you can't
influence it, for good or ill, it's makes no difference.

The work of web analysis normally goes something like this. The performance of a particular metric randomly draws your attention. It might be an alarming number of visitors failing to complete your check out process or the lackluster performance of the landing page for an advertising campaign. You develop a hypothesis that attempts to explain the behavior that you're witnessing. You take action to either reinforce or inhibit that behavior, depending upon your goal. You test your hypothesis. Then you wait and watch to see if the behavior moves in the desired direction. If it goes as expected, you're a hero. If not, you quietly revert your test and hope no one noticed. Actually, a test that fails to confirm your hypothesis is just as valuable as a success. It can help inform your next hypothesis.

Choose Your KPIs Wisely

There are plenty of metrics you could mess with but you probably have time for only a few, a manageable few. Those are the six or seven metrics most important to your organization's goals, your key performance indicators (KPIs). A KPI is a stratospheric view of your site's health. To understand the reality on the ground, you'll need to get your hands dirty with the details. KPIs are directional, pointing to where you should start grubbing.

Your KPIs will vary with the purpose of your website and your business goals. For a commercial site, KPIs are most likely related to revenue. I've borrowed the commercial KPIs recommended by Jason Burby and Shane Atchison in their book Actionable Web Analytics (Wiley Publishing, 2007).

Overall Conversion Rate
Average Order Size
Items per Order
Step-by-Step Analysis of the Conversion Funnel
Conversion Funnel Defections
First-Time Versus Returning Buyers
Effect on Offline Sales

Your purpose is to move the needle in the desired direction.
You will have established a goal for a KPI - or more likely,
your manager will have set the goal - but influencing the
trend is the real work of web analysis.

Conversion rate is immediately obvious - increasing the percentage of visitors who do what you hoped they would. Increasing the average order size and items per order both indicate greater yield per conversion and the efficiency of your online sales process. Analyzing the conversion funnel - the sequence of steps necessary to complete a purchase - and reducing the percentages of customers who drop off from one step to another can have a substantial influence on your overall conversion rate. Repeat customers cost less and provide a good indicator of customer satisfaction. And finally, your website may have an impact on offline sales, whether store front or phone center sales. Using discount codes or toll-free phone numbers that are available only on your website can help measure that impact.

You'll have noticed the importance of trending in the definition of Burby and Atchison's KPIs. Your purpose is to move the needle in the desired direction. You will have established a goal for a KPI - or more likely, your manager will have set the goal - but influencing the trend is the real work of web analysis.

Non-Commercial KPIs

For content only sites that don't sell anything Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics An Hour a Day (Wiley Publishing, 2007) suggests the following KPIs:

Visitor Loyalty
Recency
Length of Visit
Depth of Visit

Visitor loyalty is the non-commercial equivalent of first-time versus returning buyers. It provides an indication of the success of your content. Recency measures the time between visits. Length of visit is the measure of how long visitors spent on your site per visit while depth of visit is the number of pages viewed per visit. Depth of visit is the KPI formerly known as page views which has gotten a lot of bad press recently but remains a powerful metric when placed in context. In all, these four are a good indication of your visitors' engagement with your site.

Segmenting each of your KPIs into several different groups-by referrer, for example, by advertising campaign, or demographic if you're using adCenter Analytics-is a powerful technique. Drilling down into the data and analyzing the behavior of groups of visitors defined by a common characteristic can provide a more granular insight into your visitors' intent and understanding intent is the first step in providing relevance.

KPIs change over time. They aren't chiseled in stone and delivered by Charlton Heston. They need to adapt to the competitive landscape and your organization's changing goals to remain relevant.

The Bottom Line

KPIs provide a view of the health of your website, pointing the direction for further investigation, analysis, and testing. They offer a manageable handle on the complex reality of your site, a handle useful for both analyst and management. Choosing the right KPIs has a big impact on managing the success of your site and your business.