SMX East Speaker Series: Some of My Favorite Microsoft Advertising adCenter Features - #smx #22D

Today I presented at SMX East in NYC on the “Best Practices With adCenter For Bing & Yahoo” session. My fellow panelists spoke about such topics as...

1. Key differences between Adwords & adCenter
2. Quality score breakdown
3. Recent expansion of broad match & its effect on performance
4. Optimization best practices 

I thought I’d take another route.

I decided to share what, in my opinion, are some the most unique and powerful features that are under-utilized across the Microsoft Advertising search assets. This was based on what I found hundreds of advertisers & agencies are consistently un-aware of, and excited about when they find out about them.

So, here we go!

1. Microsoft Advertising Intelligence

This tool is one of least utilized, yet most powerful, campaign building & optimizing tools for adCenter. It’s a Microsoft Excel 2007 and 2010 plug-in, and can be downloaded here.

It’s an incredible resource for quickly building keyword expansions, traffic, and cost projections based on actual Bing & MSN query data, including volume, cost history, and finally demographic & geographical profiles.

2. Microsoft adCenter Desktop (Beta)

The Microsoft adCenter Desktop (Beta) is a powerful way to manage your paid search campaign in a fast & easy way, whether you are online or offline. If you haven’t upgraded the Desktop tool in a while because you always push “Postpone” when prompted to, now would be the time to revisit it! Ensure to take full advantage by installing the latest version 7.8 - it can be downloaded here.

Some of my favorite features about the Desktop tool are:

• Quickly & easily import campaigns from other engines, such as Adwords.
• Copy & paste targeting settings from one campaign to another
• NEW – Admin free upgrades. No longer do you need your network administrator or IT department to install it for you. Upgrade to version 7.8, and you can do it all on your own!

3. adCenter Quality Score

This spring, we exposed the Quality Score in adCenter, which is an insightful way to indicate the competitiveness of your keyword in the marketplace and highlight improvement opportunities in keyword relevance, landing page relevance and landing page user experience. The QS provides keyword level numeric (1-10) scores based on:

• Keyword relevance (mainly based on CTR)
• Landing page relevance (based on LP relevance to keyword, tags, etc.)
• Landing page user experience (based on page load time, original content, interstitial pages, etc.)

Note: Unlike Google Adwords QS, adCenter QS does not affect campaign performance (CPC, ad rank, minimum bid). It is merely an indicator of competitiveness of your keyword in the overall marketplace. What is neat is that adCenter also provides specific feedback on how to improve scores.

Now that you know some my favorite adCenter tools & features, go and apply them to your paid search marketing arsenal!

Thanks for reading,

Kunal Das, Search Evangelist