adCenter Blog

adCenter Spring 2009 Upgrade: Content Ads Updates (U.S. Only)

posted Mon, May 18 2009

As part of the adCenter Spring Upgrade, we're pleased to announce that Microsoft Content Ads is officially launched out of beta! The Content Ads program offers an effective way to deliver relevant ads to your audience on the Microsoft content network, which includes webpages across the Microsoft network and partner sites, including WSJ.com, FOX Sports, MSN Entertainment, RunnersWorld.com, and more.

Here are some new features in Content Ads:

More Control Over Your Ad Distribution

By using our new Website Exclusion feature, you can prevent your Content Ads from being displayed on specific sites.
You can exclude as many as 500 website addresses at the campaign or ad group level.

Distribute Your Content Ads to the Websites You Select

For new campaigns, now you can choose a new website placements "bid type and ad distribution" option that allows your Content Ads to be displayed on as many as 1,000 websites (or a single webpage within a website) in the Microsoft content network.

Get a Better Handle on your Content Ads Performance

A new site performance report can give you a deeper understanding of the performance of your Content Ads when you use the website placements bid type and ad distribution option.

Be sure to check out the other Spring Upgrade feature reviews: Campaign Management Updates, Account Management Updates, and adCenter Desktop (Beta) Updates.

To view our Feature Guide and Video Tutorials and learn how to use these new features, visit our What’s New in adCenter page in the Microsoft Advertising Learning Center (U.S.).

Feedback or questions? Please visit the adCenter Forum. And, if you haven’t done so already, become a friend of ours on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to keep up with the latest Microsoft Advertising news, tips, and tricks.

Filed under: features, Categories:Advertisers:Features:Release Updates, categories:advertisers:features, categories:advertisers:adcenter:releases, releases

Comments

Mon, May 18 2009 10:00AM

Jerry Nordstrom

Carolyn,

Great to see the content ad program open up live.

As you're well aware traffic volume has always been a bit shallow with Adcenter. However, most were okay with this knowing that what traffic was coming through was quality. As your team moves forward I hope that the desire for higher volume will always be balanced with tools to control quality.

Limit of 500 domains.

I don't yet know the full extent of your content network. We have over 4,000 sites blocked at Google.

They capped us 3 months ago and we have watched our returns from content plummet.

We have pretty much turned off Yahoo due to their lack of referral reporting and domain name exclusion limits.

It is very easy to hit a 500 domain name limit.

Remember large news sites have hundreds of sub domains or lower level directories that advertisers may want to exclude, yet retain others. A good example is msn.com here you have thousands of great content categories, but certainly not all of them will be relevant to my ads. To target them effectively I need to block a great deal of the subjects/directories that do not match your needs. money.msn.com, credit.msn.com, horoscope.msn.com.

Additionally it is highly beneficial to give advertisers the ability to target or block at least 3 directory levels down.

Many sites structure their content after the 3rd directory level. IE: xyz.com/reports/articles/money/. If you can only block and or target at the 1st level directory then in the above example I am targeting every /report possible generated by xyz.com... not exactly the precision I need.

So as Adcenter moves forward, please don't make the same mistakes made by the other two, allow for robust reporting and exclusion of irrelevant ads.
Mon, May 18 2009 11:47AM

Mel Carson - MSFT

As always Jerry thanks for the feedback! Rest assured we will be expanding the network and adding more control features. Thanks for your continued support. Cheers Mel
Tue, May 19 2009 07:57AM

Tad Miller

Site Exclusion is a nice feature. But how about giving us access to a report of clicks, CPC, Impressions, etc down to the keyword level for each content network site. Google gives us a "Placement Performance Report" that shows all this data.
Tue, May 19 2009 08:00AM

Tad Miller

How about a complete list of all the Content Network partners. "And More" is kind of vague as lists go describing the partners.
Tue, May 19 2009 06:11PM

Carolyn Miller - MSFT

Hi Tad,

Thanks for the feedback. Because we're constantly adding more partners, there is no static list that can be published. One thing you can do is run Content Ads campaigns, and then run the publisher placement report to get an idea of where your clicks and impressions are coming from.

Hope this helps,

Carolyn
Tue, May 19 2009 08:52PM

Edgar

Please open this up to global advertisers who are targeting the US for their ads too as it doesn't make sense to just limit the content network to advertisers with a physical US address. Its a globalized world and with the internet, we can sell products globally, not matter where our country of operations is.
Sat, May 23 2009 08:38AM

san@shytobuy.co.uk

Hi, we have an UK Adcenter account and I am able to pull up a report for content performance. But I am not able to find a tab to turn on and off content targeting.

Please advice
Wed, May 27 2009 01:39PM

KSal

Do you have a way to insert the referrer on the destination URL? It seems like many of the specific HTTP referrers info gets masked or converted into an msn.com referrer. For example, referrals from WSJ.com... show up as msn.com rather than wsj.com.

Thanks.
Thu, Jun 18 2009 03:08PM

Paul Reed

How can a new advertiser find out what sites are on the Microsoft content network? I'm anxious to set up placement advertising, but have no history to work with. What sites are available?
Sun, Nov 08 2009 06:05PM

Aslam

Sounds like a great work.I like to know how to insert adds on others sites?
Mon, Nov 09 2009 09:04AM

Carolyn Miller - MSFT

Hi Aslam,

For more info on our publisher program please see the publisher community: community.microsoftadvertising.com/.../Default.aspx

And here is the interest form: advertising.microsoft.com/publisher

Thanks,

Carolyn