If you’re a small business owner new to the world of online advertising, you may be a bit overwhelmed by all the of the options and features that are available to you. How can all of this help you sell your product or service?

I won’t try to give you a full seminar on online advertising in this post. Instead, I’m going to give you two quick suggestions: finding more keywords and experimenting.

Finding more keywords

What queries do people use to find stuff on Bing? How can you get your ads to show up to more people who might be interested in your product? You can use the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Add-In for Excel to find a bunch of actual search queries that are relevant to your product to use as your keywords.

For example, let’s say that you’ve written an ebook containing a bunch of riddles. What keywords should you bid on? Using the Add-in, you can get examples of additional keywords by entering “riddles” and then clicking the Queries that Contain Your Keyword button:

The Add-in returns a bunch of search queries that might be helpful to you. In this example, it seems like hard riddles, funny riddles, brain teasers riddles, extremely hard riddles, and riddles and brain teasers, are good options for keywords. Brain teasers might be a good keyword just by itself, so let’s add that one, too. Let’s also add riddle and riddles. The other queries don’t really apply to a riddle book, so we’ll delete them from the list.

Next, select the remaining keywords and click the Traffic button. This gives you the number of searches for each of the keywords.

Using these numbers, you can decide how much to bid for each of the keywords. Usually, keywords with higher monthly searches will require higher bids, so you should experiment with different keywords and bids. Maybe you don’t want to use the keywords with the most searches, because those might be too generic and cost more. But bidding on keywords with very low searches probably won’t help your sales very much.

To learn more about MAI, you should check out Zoe’s excellent blog post and visit the MAI forum.

Experiment

Learning what works and what doesn’t in an online ad can take some trial and error. One way to experiment is with the Ad Preview Tool. This tool lets you see the search results page for your keywords. Your ad will show up here if you had a winning bid. What’s cool about it is that impressions and clicks on this page don’t get billed to you. It’s like your own little sandbox where you can play around with the bid and ad to see what it looks like on Bing.

To use the Ad Preview Tool, first create your ad and keywords. Then click the Tools tab and click Ad Preview Tool. Enter one of your keywords into the box and click Preview Ads. If your ad doesn’t show up there, you should consider raising your bid or improving the relevance of your ad.

If you have any questions or comments please visit the adCenter Forum.

Thanks!

Erik