2008 adCenter Recap & What 2009 Will Bring...

Happy New Year!

Here's hoping many of you are refreshed from the festive break.

The holidays fell well enough for many of us to get a good ten days with family and friends before recharging the batteries post-New Years Eve.

It's been snowing here in London today! Nothing compared to the deluge of the white stuff that beset my colleagues in Seattle, but enough to raise a smile and the odd snowball.

As the new year resolutions start kicking in we thought we'd take a quick peek at what we covered last year and take a look at what advertisers can look forward to in 2009.

The adCenter Community Team's big news of Q1 was the launch of the new site - Welcome To The New adCenter Blog - that we launched at Search Engine Strategies in New York in March.

Since then we've pretty much posted once a day on the Advertiser Blog and added helpful content on a frequent basis to the API Developer and Analytics Blogs too.

Our top ten blog posts in 2008 were:

5 Tips For Improving Landing Page Relevancy

7 Biggest Mistakes of Web Analytics

Perfecting Pay-Per-Click Advertising With Analytics

KPIs: An Actionable Few

AdCenter Optimization Quick Reference Guide

12 Steps To Effective Online Budget Allocation

adExcellence Tutorial Series: Editorial Guidelines

Sneak peek into the adCenter Fall Upgrade

Your adCenter Questions Answered: Part I - Negative Keywords, Excel Bulk Uploads and Editing

Announcing the adCenter Desktop Beta

We've talked about, and we hope you've had a chance to try out, some of the new features and tools that have been released by the adCenter team over the past year.

• There was the Spring Upgrade where we added some new campaign management functionality
• In April we launched the adCenter Add-In for Excel Tutorials
• June saw the adCenter Desktop Beta call for sign ups
• adCenter Publisher Pilot was launched in July
• adCenter Learning Center was opened at the start of the Fall
• Our October upgrade saw a plethora of new features added too!
• We added an adCenter Facebook Page and an adCenter Blog Twitter feed so advertisers can feel even more connected to our news, tips, tricks and best practice advice
• Our accreditation program, adExcellence, was updated
• We now have a regular podcast called Microsoft Advertising Insights

2009 will see much of the same and more.

We'll be make some improvements to the adCenter Community site to further enhance your experience and, following the success of our industry expert series on the Analytics Blog, we'll be adding more ideas and advice from willing participants to help you get the best from your internet advertising endeavours.

Lastly, we will of course keep acting on the feedback we get from you in the adCenter Forums!

If there's anything you'd like to see from us 2009 then comment below or start a thread in the forum.

Cheers and good luck!

Mel

PS: As always, you can keep up with us by becoming a fan on Facebook or through following us on Twitter.