adCenter Blog

Boundless Productivity: Computing and Printing On-the-Go for SMBs

2012-02-03T21:48:31Z

If the last two decades were defined by the explosion of personal computing, the current decade will be defined by a great untethering. Now, you are free to work from anywhere, print from virtually anywhere and expand your productivity through the broadband wireless revolution and the devices that have grown out of it.

Mobile devices

Devices like smartphones are built for mobile multitasking, featuring full keyboards, 4G speed and web browser capability—all in a package small enough to fit in your back pocket (with room to spare). Laptops round out the personal computing options that can help you become—and stay—mobile.

Web-connected printers and mobile printing features

This new generation of mobile devices is supported by a network of complementary web-connected printers and wireless printing features that let you virtually print from anywhere to anywhere. Printers are now multi-functioning with features like ePrinting— allowing them to connect to the Internet directly and letting you print from anywhere with a web connection by emailing the printer’s unique email address.

With new tools and new technology available, web-connected printers can now provide extra benefits:

Save time: Attach your document to an email and hit send so it will be waiting in your print tray when you arrive in the office.
Streamline workflow: Save precious seconds while you’re on the go by sending information directly to in-house staff or colleagues working in satellite locations.
Improve client relationships: Share your printer’s email address with visiting clients and let them print important documents without the tedious process of installing software.
Work from anywhere: Print and share travel itineraries, directions, purchase confirmations and more, right from your mobile device.
Print when out-of-range of your wireless network: Print remotely from your smartphone using products like HP’s ePrint-enabled printers.

Thanks for reading,

Melissa Zieger

Melissa Zieger (@HP_SmallBiz) is the editor-in-chief of HP's SMB blog, 367 Addison Avenue and a worldwide public relations manager for HP's Personal Systems Group.

Finding Lost Impressions with the Share of Voice Report in Microsoft Advertising adCenter

2012-02-02T20:00:00Z

It’s frustrating. You go to your local hardware store (or super-store) to buy some screws to fix that loose kitchen cabinet door, and you buy one of those handy packages of 10. You only need eight, so that should take care of it. Back at home you open the bag – and count out seven, yes, seven screws. You paid for 10, you got seven. You’re feeling…well…frustrated. Now imagine that you’ve spent a goodly amount of advertising budget on your online search campaign...(read more)

British advertisers: get ready to benefit from a combined Yahoo! and Bing audience by April.

2012-02-02T10:39:00Z

As we initiated the Microsoft and Yahoo! Search Alliance, we committed to offer each of our customers a quality transition towards the newly formed combined market place. For that reason, we are providing you on this blog with regular updates on the progress we make, and some guidance on how to prepare for the transition. For instance, when we initiated mid-January to test the delivery of paid search results from adCenter on a small percentage of Yahoo! traffic in France and the UK, we encouraged adCenter customers to closely monitor their campaigns and to be prepared to increase their budget if it was more than 80 per cent depleted.

Soon, we will start the next phase towards combining Bing and Yahoo! Search audiences, and wanted therefore to give you further guidance to advertisers who would currently run some search marketing campaign on Yahoo!.

Your Yahoo! Search Marketing account transition will be soon available.

As part of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, Yahoo! Search Marketing users will need to transition their accounts to Microsoft Advertising adCenter in February. While there is no action required today, it’s important to know that we will provide support and an easy-to-use transition tool when we are closer to transition. This tool will be available as an extra Tab in your Yahoo! Search Marketing account starting from mid-February.

The full transition process itself is fairly simple and you will be guided through it:

Setting up your account in adCenter, if you do not already have one;
Ensuring that all your campaigns are ready in adCenter. By default, campaigns imported from Yahoo! Search Marketing will be paused until the ad serving transition happens. We will provide you more insights soon on how to make the most of adCenter unique capabilities and latest features, so that you can thrive in the combined auction;
Ad serving transition is when the Yahoo! traffic will start to flow through adCenter. This final phase will be complete when 100% of the Yahoo! search traffic is exposed to adCenter ads. At that stage only, your Yahoo! Search Marketing account will become read-only and will stop serving any ad impressions.

By following the instructions in the specially compiled Transition Checklist, small businesses will ensure to transition their accounts with ease and with little impact to their search marketing campaigns. Larger advertisers, with complex account structure or extensive portfolios, will be soon contacted by Microsoft and Yahoo! representatives to explore together the best approach for their specific case.

Register for the upcoming free webinar on 22nd February

We will attend SES London later this month to answer questions you may have about the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. But we will also organise a one-hour webinar on February 22nd during which our experts will walk you through the overview of the Search Alliance, its benefits, the transition overview and the features comparison between the two platforms and their implications when setting up your campaign in adCenter. If you’d like to attend the webinar, please register here.

Towards a competitive search marketing alternative

Yahoo! Search and Bing will offer a competitive search offering that provides advertisers both quality audiences and opportunities to leverage strategic partnerships to efficiently deliver a strong return on investment. We expect to complete our transition in the UK, France and Ireland by end of April 2012. This means our advertisers will start benefiting from the new joint audiences by the second quarter of 2012. By then, you will be able to advertise on the full Yahoo! Search, Bing and their partner networks traffic through your adCenter campaigns. However, we are keen to bring you the benefits of our combined audiences sooner and may accelerate the transition in these markets if we can do so while still maintaining a quality experience.

As always, we will keep you informed of our progress. So stay tuned.

Release Announcement: Ad Description Character Length, Budget Overview and Targeting Updates in adCenter

2012-02-01T18:00:00Z

Last year was a pretty busy one across the board for all the teams that touch adCenter. Not only were our development teams hard at work rolling out new features and functionality in both the UI and tools, the Customer and Partner Experience team also debuted their Feature Suggestion Forum and here on the Community team, we launched the Microsoft Advertising for Small Business page on Facebook Now that 2012 is well underway, we’re looking forward to another great year of making adCenter the...(read more)

#TurbineHQ on Pay Per Click Advertising for Small Businesses and a £30 Start Up Offer #SmallBiz

2012-01-31T09:18:00Z

If you own a small business you know that advertising your enterprise is important. You probably also have a lot of other things to do to keep your company running and allocating time to get your head around pay per click (PPC) advertising may not be top of the list. It doesn’t have to be time consuming however and many small businesses before you have tried and tested it with great results to match.

Small businesses sharing their digital marketing experience

Last week we shared an interview with the owner of a pharmacy in London’s Covent Garden who explained that PPC advertising helped them compete with big brands and to reach new customers. This week we’ve been talking to Matthew Stibbe who is not only a pilot and writer for a living but also the founder of www.TurbineHQ.com; an online self-service HR admin system.

PPC Objective

Matthew was looking for an online advertising solution that could help them gain visibility for Turbine in the marketplace. The United States is an important target market for them, so advertising on Bing seemed like an obvious choice since it opens international opportunities in addition to the UK Market.

PPC Results

It took Matthew under an hour to set up Turbine’s Microsoft Advertising adCenter account and soon saw the results: Turbine’s advertisements were consistently displaying in the number one or two spot on the Bing search page. He found the cost of his campaign competitive and was contented with the acquisition leads it was giving him. On top of that the free tools gave him insight into which keywords from his PPC campaign had been most successful which enables him to fine-tune his advertising efforts even further.

How can we help you?

I know we can tell you that digital advertising isn’t hard to grasp and that it is a very cost effective way to advertise but maybe you should see it for yourself. If you like to give PPC advertising a go then go to the Microsoft Advertising for Small Business Facebook page to claim £30 worth of free* clicks . Good luck and do get in touch with us if you have any questions or need support!

* See offer conditions

Money-Saving Tips on Creating Your Own Marketing Brochure In-House #SMB #smallbiz

2012-01-27T17:00:00Z

Customers love when businesses have printed materials to share. Whether you are a real estate agent or flower shop owner, the power of a good brochure that delivers your message with vivid visual impact cannot be overestimated. A marketing brochure can boost your sales efforts instantly, and by creating those materials in-house, you can save both time and money.

Why create a brochure in-house?

There are some great benefits for small businesses that print materials in-house. Not only does using high-quality printers like OfficeJets make it easy to save big with in-house marketing materials, but more control can be used when customizing content. Businesses can take extra care in developing a brochure that builds loyalty, understanding and potentially reaches new audiences.

If you’re not too sure about developing a brochure for your audience without a design professional, here are a few tips to develop a clear, focused message that will visually appeal to you target readers:

· Study your audience: Understand who your target reader is and craft a message that reflects their demographic, likes, dislikes and individual category, whether that is stay-at-home moms or Chicago baseball fans.

· Plan your message: Use insights from your customers, employees, and salespeople to create a message that is clear, concise and gives a “call to action” for the readers.

· Compile your artwork: Pictures and illustrations are almost always the first thing readers look at in brochures, so make sure all visuals reflect your business’ culture and are consistent with the theme of the content. Digital cameras can be used to take professional-looking shots and sites like Wylio.com have free images for download.

With your established brochure content in place, many websites and types of software like Adobe InDesign offer professional-looking brochure templates that you can download, easily personalize, and then print yourself. Here are tips when using brochure templates:

· Editing headlines and copy: An easy way to catch typos when you’re done adding text is to read the text and headlines out loud. Ask someone else to read it too.

· Communicate with color: Experiment with color by changing them to match the message of your business. It's best to limit the number of colors to two or three, and choose complimentary colors that go with the hue and lightness of your art.

· Add photos and artwork: Before adding your artwork to the brochure template, remember to touch up, crop or improve your images using your favorite photo- or imaging-editing software before inserting the image into the template.

· Save your work: Brochure files can be quite large once you have added your image files. If you make several brochures to target different audiences, consider making a backup on CD to save your hard drive space. Also, be sure to save your document every few minutes to prevent disasters in the event the computer crashes or the power suddenly goes out.

· Choose the right paper: Spend time going over your paper options to really bring your brochure to life.

· Check brochure on paper: Producing a "proof" on plain paper first, allows you to check your picture placement and color. It also helps you practice your two-sided printing directions and saves the valuable specialty paper you'll use for the final brochure. Here are more guidelines for flawless prints:

o Use plain paper and draft mode for your proof copy.

o Follow Microsoft Word directions for two-sided printing.

o Try marking the top of the paper before your print, to help you visualize how both sides of paper flow through the printer.

o Have someone proof again.

o Use highest-quality setting when printing your final brochures.

o To avoid ink smears, set the pages aside to dry completely in between printing on the front and back.

o To extend the physical life of your brochures, store them in a dark, dry place.

With the above tools, technology and tips, any business can create professional and impactful brochures to increase sales, customers and credibility. For more information about HP’s print offerings, you can visit here.

The Evolution of Bing, adCenter Feedback and What M&Ms Have in Common with Both

2012-01-26T17:00:00Z

While scrolling through my Facebook feed last night, I ran across a shared link from a friend highlighting a Technorati article by Andrew Froehlich, Bing: The New King of Search .* Needless to say, I felt compelled to click through… having watched the evolution of Bing since arriving here at Microsoft, I have to say without any bias whatsoever that the decision engine has come a long way. It’s old news now, but I clearly remember this article from ZDNet.com stood out to me when I ran...(read more)

UK Bing Launches ‘Help Your Britain’ Campaign to Celebrate the Work of Britain’s Unsung Charities #helpyourbritain, #charity

2012-01-26T12:12:00Z

Every once in a while I do wonder if I shouldn’t be doing something a little bit more, well useful with my life. Don’t you? Perhaps I should get my driving license, buy a race car and get on with it but seriously: this isn’t midlife crisis just yet. The good intentions are all there but the time isn’t, not now anyway. That’s why it’s so nice to see that Bing (the search engine you should all be advertising on to achieve an amazing ROI with our help) has been lending its homepage to small charities this week enabling them to tell their story to Bing’s users.

Every Last Friday of the Month Bing will Feature a Charity of Your Choice

In Britain there are more than 187,000 registered charities – all worthy to get some attention and the chance to tell their story. Each day this week Bing has been highlighting a charity as part of a long-term campaign in which the British public will be able to nominate the charities they would like to see featured on the homepage on the final Friday of each month via www.bing.com/HelpYourBritain. The Bing hotspots providing background information about the cause.

The last few days you’ve been able to learn more about :

Magic Breakfast: Delivers free, healthy breakfast foods to UK primary schools where more than 50% of pupils qualify for free school meals.
Lifelites: Started out as a pilot project in 1999 with the idea of providing education and entertainment technology for children in hospices currently serving around 5,000 children and their families in England, Wales and Scotland.
All Dogs Matter: A voluntary dog rescue based in London. It is focused on rescuing and re-homing each dog it takes into care, ensuring that it will be safe and loved for the rest of its life.

Today’s yellow speech bubbles represent User Voice, an organization founded in 2009 by Mark Johnson, an ex-offender whose aim was to foster dialogue between those who have experience of the criminal justice system and the system itself to bring about its reform and reduce offending rates. Tomorrow you’ll find we draw attention to Life Cycle UK ; a Bristol-based organization that aims to inspire people and equip them with the skills, the knowledge and the confidence to make cycling part of their everyday lives.

What could you do?

Your advertising campaign can wait for a minute. Look at the Bing homepage, have a look at the charities on the homepage. You can also nominate a charity close to your heart to feature on our homepage on the last Friday of the month at www.bing.com/HelpYourBritain. It won’t only help deserving charities – it will also make you feel very useful and it won’t take much time at all!

The Two Things Every #PPC Beginner Should Know How to Do #SMB #smallbiz

2012-01-24T17:00:00Z

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...(read more)

Content is King in the Land of #SEO - Get an Early Bird Discount on Tickets for the Online Business Makeover Event London on 12th March 2012 #Smallbiz

2012-01-24T11:02:00Z

Nick James is founder of Fresh Business Thinking , the leading website for small-to-medium size businesses in the UK. Over 55% of traffic to Nick’s websites comes from search engines pointing queries to top quality ideas and information making Nick something of a content evangelist. In addition to Fresh Business Thinking Nick runs International Trade and The International Trade Awards As a ‘Johnny Come Lately’ to the online world I have a pretty good understanding of the problems...(read more)

Harry Ganz of London’s Garden Pharmacy on Pay Per Click Advertising on Bing #PPC #Retail #Smallbiz

2012-01-23T15:45:00Z

Harry Ganz - CEO of the Garden Pharmacy in London’s Covent Garden – brought his business online in 1993. After trying various ways of advertising including newspaper and radio ads Harry turned to online advertising on Bing.

One of the main advantages of PPC advertising for the Garden Pharmacy is that it enabled them to compete with big brands and that it helped the business to reach new customers.

Watch the video to find out what benefits Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising on Bing brought to this small business:

We like to help your small business to compete and to reach new customers through PPC. If you are not yet advertising on Bing today sign up now and benefit from £30 worth of free* clicks. Find this coupon on the Microsoft Advertising for Small Business Facebook page

* See offer conditions

Microsoft Advertising adCenter: Help Whenever You Need It, However You Want It

2012-01-19T17:00:00Z

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who pick up the phone and call support, and those who don’t. My husband sits squarely in the latter category… he will exhaust every resource known to man before he’ll get to the point where he’ll seek out a phone number. He doesn’t have an adCenter account, but if he did, I know the Support Center would have a place in his list of bookmarks. If you haven’t been to the Support Center on the Microsoft Advertising...(read more)

Launched: Broad Match Enhancements in the UK and France

2012-01-19T15:22:00Z

As we mentioned in our Search Alliance announcement last week we want to let you know the latest news about and what you can expect in the UK and France over the coming weeks.

One of these changes is that we’ve very recently released an improvement to our method of ad selection for broad match keywords to bring more relevant traffic to your website. If you have ads set to “broad match,” you may notice some changes in your impression volume, clicks, and cost-per-click.

To take advantage of the increased volume, monitor your campaign budgets closely and prepare to increase your budget if it becomes more than 80 percent depleted.

If you’re seeing impressions and clicks that you would like to avoid, you can:

Adjust your bids or keyword match settings from broad match to another match setting, such as exact or phrase match.
Consider using negative keywords to prevent unwanted impressions.

How to find or improve negative keywords?

1. Keyword Research Tool

Negative keywords can be researched through the adCenter UI where you use the ‘research keywords’ functionality which you can find under the ‘tools’ tab when you are signed in into adCenter. Within the ‘research keywords’ functionality you find a ‘negative keywords’ tab. Type in the product you’d like to find negative keywords for and possible negative keywords will be proposed to you.

Example of how to find negative keywords in the adCenter UI

2. Search Query Report

Another way to understand which keywords you may need as negative matches is by using the Search Query report.

You find the search query report under the ‘reports’ tab in adCenter

Go to 1.’basic settings’
Go to ‘report’ and select ‘search query performance’ in the report drop down.
Further down you can choose if you want to run this report on ‘all accounts, campaigns and ad groups’ or ‘specific accounts, campaigns and ad groups’
Finally press ‘create report’ at the bottom of the page.

This will give you an overview of the search terms searchers have used that made them find and click on your ad. Besides finding new keywords you can see terms here you’d rather not show up for - which can be added to your negative matches. More about the search query report soon.

Read more about negative keywords here You can find out more about match types and how these can contribute to your pay per click success here

Simone Schuurer – EMEA Community Site Manager

Learn From the #Search #Advertising Stories of UK Small Businesses #smallbiz

2012-01-16T11:18:43Z

You’re reading the adCenter blog, so it’s likely you may be running one or more pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns with us to advertise your business on Bing. You know that, through Bing, you can reach 14 million unique searchers a month in the UK** and that there are free tools that can help you to manage your campaigns and import any existing ones you may run elsewhere. If you don’t you may even be more interested.

Today we launched a Facebook campaign in the UK and France to help more businesses like yours reach new customers with the help of our fictional UK small business customers Stan & Dan.

What does Stan know about online advertising that Dan doesn’t? You can watch their video on our Facebook page to find out how advertising on Bing worked for them and hear stories from real-life small businesses that found success with search advertising. Of course we’d love to hear from you as well. What has worked for you and what tips can you share with new advertisers?

Advertisers new to adCenter can claim £30 in free* advertising for their first Bing campaign so please feel free to ~~like~~ share the word!

* See offer conditions **ComScore August 2011

Quick #PPC Tips on How to Make the Best of Valentine’s Day #SEM

2012-01-16T09:46:00Z

When the shops opened in England right after Christmas I noticed chocolate bunnies and Easter eggs were for sale. Now whilst these bunnies seemed a bit eager to me, acting ahead of seasonality in search is a good idea. With roughly a month to go until Valentine’s Day now it is the time to check if your #PPC accounts are in order to benefit, where possible, from this event.

Unlike Chocolate Easter Bunnies – Seasonal PPC optimisation are never too early

Which products benefit from Valentine?

If someone asked me what would make a good present my answer would be that imaginative gifts which demonstrate who well someone knows you are the best – books or a set of screwdrivers can be really romantic gifts. However we usually see a search uplift of the following products:

Flowers
Chocolates
Lingerie
Travel/Short Breaks
Jewelry
Dating (not so much a product but seeing an uplift indeed in January and February)

However this should not stop you marketing other products & services in an imaginative way!

Using traffic and demographic insights

In my search media analyst past I found it very interesting to get human insights from search stats. This is how I confirmed by suspicion that men panic-buy their Valentine flowers (traffic before Valentine’s Day peaking just before the event) whereas come Mother’s Day women (organised & thoughtful as we are) order their flowers well before the event.

The trick for the switched on marketer is thus to find out the traffic trends of various products and services and who searches for them. So in the case of panic buying men you could make the last ordering date (if late) a clear USP:

‘Gentlemen don’t panic: Pam’s Petals takes Valentine orders till 13/02’.

You can redirect them to a high street store (when applicable) once the online cut-off point has been reached:

‘Late buying flowers? Find beautiful roses from £7 in all our stores’.

Playing mind tricks? I think you’d being considerate helping your customer in a moment of need

Roses and lingerie both see a peak time in searches in February (source Microsoft Advertising Intelligence)

How to optimise your search account for Valentine?

1. Research and expand keywords with Microsoft Advertising Intelligence

2. Create and launch your Valentine’s Day-specific ad copy and use dynamic text.

3. Monitor and adjust your bidding strategy to maintain top position and solid performance history

4. Set up demographic targeting to capture age and/or gender-specific audiences

Dating Optimisation Tips

Another area set to profit from Valentine’s Day is the dating industry. A lonely Christmas (or a Christmas break-up!) followed by a bleak January with the ‘month of love’ to follow hot on its heels urges singletons to reinvigorate their search for a partner. Here are some dating optimisation tips from our expert Philip Ryan:

1. Be Specific with Locations: Geo-target ads regionally and use dynamic text... so a searcher in Cardiff knows cupid’s arrow can land on their doorstep, not a 2 hour train journey away!

2. Inspire Confidence in Searchers: If you have tens of thousands of members, mention that you have “tens of thousands of genuine singles”.

3. Include Seasonal References: Affirm what the searcher is looking for, for example, “New year, new love” and “Find Valentine’s Love” work better than “Online Dating Site”.

4. Use dynamic text: Increase your chances of highly relevant ads by using dynamic text in your ad titles, so a user searching for “London singles” will see your ad that had been set up as “Find {keyword}”... they’ll see it in their results as “Find London Singles”.

5. Calls to Action: Encourage searchers to “Join the fun” or “Find love”.

6. Brand Your Ads: Make sure you include the brand name within the ad copy. If you are advertising offline or running a display campaign the brand recognition will encourage clicks.

7. Include Your Promotion Info: If you have an offer, such as 30-days free membership, make sure to say so in your ad copy.

Valentine falls on a Tuesday this year which should be good news for all online advertisers as generally the event fares better for online if it takes place on a weekday so get optimising!

Simone Schuurer - EMEA Community Site Manager