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Plurals, spelled with an “s” – that’s what I’d like to talk about. Specifically, how plurals are an integral part of your search campaigns, and how they are treated differently in Microsoft adCenter than they were in Yahoo!’s Panama search platform.
One is the Loneliest Number
If you recently migrated your Yahoo! accounts into adCenter and have left everything “as-is,” you may be missing out on some easy traffic. Why? There is a key difference at play behind the scenes between how adCenter views keywords and how Panama used to view keywords; while Yahoo! used to assume that bidding on the keyword “car” automatically meant that an advertiser also wanted to bid on the keyword “cars,” adCenter does not.
If you’re new to adCenter, make sure to go through your campaigns and look for keywords that can be pluralized. Each keyword is treated as a separate entity, and adCenter will not automatically serve your ads for singular keywords if the searcher’s query is written in the plural form.
For example, if you are bidding on “car” but not “cars,” the following might occur:
It’s a Quick Fix
If you can’t remember the last time you took a good hard look at your Yahoo! campaigns and have recently moved them into adCenter, I highly recommend taking a minute or two to make sure you’ve got all of your keywords pluralized before the Holiday traffic has peaked out. You can either export your keyword list using the Microsoft adCenter Desktop, or run a quick analysis of your highest performing keywords using an adCenter Keyword Performance Report and adding pluralized versions of your most successful keywords.
Irregular Plurals
Don’t forget about irregular plurals, either. These are the words that won’t be turned into their plural form just by adding an “s” to the end. A few examples of irregular plurals include words such as:
· Box – Boxes
· Elf – Elves
· Penny – Pennies
· Scarf – Scarves
· Mouse – Mice
· Woman – Women
· Child - Children
If English isn’t your first language and you find this to be too difficult to try on your own (I completely understand; I grew up in a home speaking Dutch) I recommend searching on Bing using the query “irregular plurals” to help you find sites that can make pluralizing easier for you.
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What about Google Adwords imports. I've imported a couple of campaigns that perform remarkably well on Google Adwords only to find that they aren't producing many impressions. CTR and conversion rate are also down.
Hi Joshua,
Thanks for reading. What industry are you advertising in? Did you keep all of your bids the same?
Thanks for the post Michael! Let's say I've inherited an adCenter account with a large amount of duplicate keywords, across various ad groups, including singulars and plurals. If my bids and history are the same, how does adCenter choose which keyword and corresponding ad to publish?
Hi Brock,
The scenario of a set of duplicates all with the exact same history is highly unlikely. Over time, one of the keyword/ad combinations in a set of duplicates will have "eeked" above the others through sheer probability. What I mean is, it's not very plausible that a set of keywords and ads rotated evenly will be clicked on in the same manner each time by Bing/Yahoo! users. Eventually, some ads and some keywords will end up on top because of the different users they reach.
If I were in your shoes, I'd identify all of the duplicates in the accounts (using the =VLOOKUP formula in Excel) and eliminate the "losers" by running keyword and ad performance reports for as far back as you can go. The more data you have collected over time, the more a trend will emerge as to which keywords or ads are the best. This will help ensure that adCenter doesn't ever choose to display "losing" keywords or ads, which would cost you more money for the same avg. position.
Best of luck in your de-duping!