It can drive you mad sometimes.

You’ve spent days, maybe weeks agreeing on strategy, keywords and ad text with your client and they have finally said “Go!” You figure that’s the final hurdle; putting all those spreadsheets and campaigns up in adCenter in the hopes of getting traffic to your clients. So you do all the work, press the button and go home for the night, safe in the knowledge that Microsoft will look after you. Then the next morning, your customer asks where his traffic is. You check and find the ads aren’t live. It’s highly awkward and rather frustrating.

I’m an advertiser – not a Microsoft employee – so I feel your pain, but you need to check for yourself that your campaign is up and running and you also need to be aware just how many things to check for.

Some are simple mistakes, others are simply a case of having to be vigilant.

Falling Foul of Editorial Guidelines

This is one of the hardest to predict in advance. For example, did you know that advertising methods to avoid traffic tickets is not allowed? No idea why, because an EU ruling made it clear this was fine – and advice like “Park in our Car Park” might be construed as such a method. The full adCenter editorial guidelines are really quite developed, and many of them generate automated flags while others might get picked up with manual flags. I’ll talk about them in next month’s post, but you should review both the editorial guidelines and the disallowed products and services prior to uploading your campaigns.

Budget

I have always had a tendency to put a limit on the budget right at the start of my work, just in case I inadvertently try to set bid prices up at 50 dollars a click instead of 50 cents. This can easily lead to campaigns being all ready to go, but with no money in the pot to let them show. Have a look at your budgets both across the whole account and also across the campaign.

Bid Price

In a similar vein to budget, but much more likely, you need to check that you have set a realistic bid price for traffic. Many people are just “dipping their toes” into the search engine marketing (SEM) space. Just because the minimum bid price is a few pennies per click, it is entirely possible that your competitors have already worked out what the traffic is worth and have decided to pay substantially more for the traffic. Good quality adverts, with good historical click through rates (CTRs) are rewarded by Microsoft, giving your advert more impressions, and clicks at a lower cost per click, but until you HAVE an historical click through rate for a particular keyword that is mathematically meaningful, you might need to push the boat out for just a bit.

My advice would be to start with a bid price which is certainly likely to generate enough impressions at the start, then try to bring it down through quality text that generates good click-through rates.

Uploading a Spreadsheet

When you upload a spreadsheet – maybe with many hundreds of ad groups – the system does not make the adGroups live until you “submit” them from the web interface after upload. This is now quite easy to do, once you know how:

1. Select an imported campaign.

2. If you have not set a budget for your campaign, at the top of the Select an ad group page, click [Edit], type a campaign budget, and then click Save.

3. Select the check boxes next to the ad groups you want to submit, click Submit ad group.

Using the adCenter Preview Tool to check

Checking whether your advert is live on Bing is now easier, using the adCenter Ad Preview tool. This tool lets you check on whether your advert is running without detrimentally affecting the quality of your advert’s performance. It’s probably best to use the tool as soon as you have set your campaign live... that way you’ll avoid the call from the client altogether.

Best,

Dixon

Dixon Jones is the Managing director of from Receptional Internet Marketing Consultants – a UK consultancy specializing in search marketing.