Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Add-in Offers Flexibility

I like simple, flexible tools that help make day-to-day work a little bit easier…and free is always good. Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (MAI), an Excel Add-in, is one of them. This tool can help you research keywords so you can optimize your campaign's performance. What I like most about MAI is I can run short, specific queries for quick slices of data or larger, more complex queries, depending on what I need.

To start, you can run a simple query to suggest terms that are similar to keywords you already have in mind. Say, for example, you're looking for terms related to vintage furniture (I admit I have a penchant for collecting fabulous finds at my local opportunity shops). Just enter vintage furniture anywhere in your Excel spreadsheet, point to Keyword suggestions in the toolbar, and select one of the following:

• Campaign Association
• Queries That Contain Your Keyword
• Related Search

Et voilà: the tool generates suggestions with corresponding confidence ratings.

If I want to know what campaign associations the tool can suggest, I can run that query. It gives me terms like antique furniture, retro furniture, and funky furniture. A search for terms containing my original keywords brings up, among others, vintage shabby chic furniture, painted vintage furniture, and vintage furniture stores. Another search for related keywords, and I get retro vintage furniture and vintage mid century modern furniture. Ooh, now we’re talking.

More interested in historic and forecasted data on your keywords? You can look for the most popular keywords based on traffic spikes, domain, vertical, or most frequent search queries.

You can also analyze the traffic of select keywords by day or month.

Don't want to run queries one at a time? Easy as pie. Just use the three-step keyword wizard to generate a more comprehensive, detailed report.

You can customize how you want the tool to generate keywords, create all kinds of expanded keywords, and even configure the type of KPI reporting you want to see.

Download Microsoft Advertising Intelligence and let us know what you think.