UK, CA & FR Advertisers - Download adCenter Desktop Beta & Set Your Defaults

Following on from Tina's post in February, we're pleased to announce that we're inviting UK & France advertisers with less than 100K keywords in their combined accounts to download the adCenter Desktop Tool.

When you log into adCenter you’ll see a link on the right-hand side of the home page inviting you to Download adCenter Desktop Beta.

As Tina's post says, "If you’re unfamiliar with adCenter Desktop, it’s an offline tool that enables seamless integration with adCenter online; you download your campaigns to work on them and then upload new changes or additions to your adCenter account at your convenience. Whether you want to perform bulk edits, monitor performance data or research keywords, this free, easy-to-use new tool may be just what you're looking for."

In this article I’m going to be running over some very useful tips and tricks that should really help advertisers ensure your campaigns and ad groups are set to the correct targeting - UK in my examples below but French and Canadian customers can use this info for their accounts as well.

For further handy hints, please continue to read the adCenter Community Blog and watch out for the tutorial videos coming with adExcellence - the adCenter Accreditation programme.

Adjusting Settings for UK Distribution

Even though adCenter Desktop v1 wasn’t localised for the UK market, that didn’t stop advertisers, clients and agencies from using the tool to full capacity. Often this was just to make a few extra checks before uploading to ensure the correct settings were applied – an issue that some advertisers had pain points around with the previous beta release.

adCenter Desktop V2.3 is localised and brings with it new and improved functionality such as integrated charts, alerts, and favourites, whilst maintaining the core functionality to download, upload, amend and edit your accounts, campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads.

Below is a step-by-step guide on checks you should make if you’re advertising in the UK, from starting the tool for the first time to being ready to upload into your account/s:

Opening for the first time

After opening the tool for the first time, you’ll be prompted to login and download your chosen account/s. After completing this step, you should:

1. Click the Microsoft adCenter Desktop Button – (found in the very top left hand corner):

2. Click on Desktop Options – a new pop-up window will appear as shown in the below screenshots:

3. Click on the Advanced Tab found within the Desktop Options ‘pop-up’. This will now show you some of the default settings you can apply to your tool.

4. Changing this setting the very first time will keep this as your default settings when creating new Campaigns and Ad Groups with the tool. (If you need to amend this in future please follow steps 1-3 above).

Tips & Tricks for Targeting the UK Market

Knowing your market and language setting is a great start to ensure you’re delivering on the correct Distribution Channel. For example ‘English – United Kingdom’ means your ads will serve on www.msn.co.uk and www.Live.com search results.

To ensure your campaigns and ad groups appear just within your chosen demographic you also need to select, for example, ‘United Kingdom’ in the targeting options. To check and set targeting to the UK easily at a Customer, Account, Campaign or Ad Group level please follow the steps below:

To Check Targeting in the ‘Manager ‘Pane:

1. Click the Ad Groups Tab, then

2. Click on the ‘Select Columns button

3. In the new open window, select ‘Language and Market’, and ‘Targeting’

4. In the Manager view you can now see both the ‘Language and Market’, and ‘Targeting‘columns

5. You now have the option to select the ad groups with targeting ‘Off’ and set the targeting in the ‘Editor ‘ view to your desired location, i.e. United Kingdom

Quickly Find Out How Many Ad Groups are Targeted/Not Targeted:

You can also quickly get adCenter Desktop to count the number of ad groups in your ‘Browser’ that are targeted or not targeted. Similar to Window’s Explorer you can check the preferences of your Customer, Account, Campaign or Ad Group.

1. Right-Click on the Customer, Account, Campaign or Ad group within the ‘Browser’

2. A pop-up will open, counting the ‘properties’ of your chosen customer, account, campaign or ad group.

3. To quickly set the targeting at a Customer, Account, Campaign or Ad Group level (depending on what you selected in Step 1) you can click on the ‘Targeting’ option in the same pop-up window.

I hope you find the above tips useful and allow you greater insight into setting your accounts, campaigns and ad groups to a wide variety of target markets. I have used the UK as an example in this article; however this can be used for all markets available.

Please continue to check the adCenter Community Blog for more ‘tips and trick’s’ and other articles to gain the most out of your adCenter Desktop.

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Regards,

Adam

UK Search Media Strategist