On Monday we received news that Microsoft adCenter was upgraded with some new features that will really help us manage campaigns much easier.  Microsoft finally responded to many requests to make these changes.  These changes include improvements to Campaign Management, Editorial Improvements, User Management and Content Ads.

Improvements to the Campaign Management include the ability to pause and resume ads and keywords, geo-targeting enhancements, and improved performance reporting ont he Ads page.  Editorial improvements include faster reviews, dynamic feedback about why ads and keywords were disapproved, and inline notification when dynamic text causes your ads to exceed character limits.  An upgrade to user management allows you to have multiple users for the same account.  Lastly, you are able to get keyword bid suggestions and performance estimates for your content ads in the U.S.

I am especially happy about the ability to pause and resume ads and keywords with MSN.  This was a major feature that MIcrosoft adCenter was missing for a long time and will really help search marketers control the performance of campaigns.

When building an effective search marketing campaign, one of the most important things is making sure that you have an extensive keyword list so that your ads are showing up for all relevant searches. Just as important, however, is using qualifiers in your search terms so they don’t show up for irrelevant searches. For example, you want to make sure you have plural and non-plural variations of your words such as “game” and “games”. Yahoo does not let you add all of these variations. Instead, if you were to add the keywords “game” and “games”, Yahoo would only take the word “games” because it feels that one word covers both; Yahoo calls this Advanced Matching. With Yahoo’s Advanced Matching, your keywords get treated as a broad match and it uses your keywords in various contexts. You could use Standard Match for exact matches of your keywords, which is fine but you can’t build a keyword list that is thorough enough to cover all of the search queries you would want to display your ad.

Are you starting to see the problem here?

In a recent analysis of a campaign, my colleague, PPC Handyman, discovered a prime example of why Yahoo’s Advanced Matching is severely flawed. In this picture, you see the KeywordName and the UserQuery. Our very specific keyword “be a security guard” is displaying an ad when someone searches for the very broad term “guard”.

This is a result of what we might call a liberal matching criteria being employed by Yahoo’s Advanced Match Criteria, and it pretty much undermines all of our faith in Yahoo’s commitment to delivering relevant ads for us.

No wonder click-through rates and conversion percentages are almost always lower on Yahoo then on Google.It’s because our ads are most likely showing up for very broad, irrelevant searches like the one above.

The great thing about Search Engine Marketing is that for the most part, we have control over when and where our ads show up, as well as the ability to capture data and see results. Yahoo is completely taking this control out of our hands and the results we are seeing are proving this. Yahoo needs to take care of this problem soon, or people are going to start losing trust in them and continue to spend their Marketing budgets elsewhere.

Last Thursday, Google announced that they agreed to a non-exclusive search services agreement with Yahoo! The agreement “gives Yahoo! the ability to use Google’s search and contextual advertising technology through its AdSense for Search and AdSense for Content advertising programs.”

The question is who does this benefit? So far, it seems this agreement will benefit not only Google, Yahoo!, but the users and consumers as well.

As for Google, this makes complete sense because it will give them more control over the marketplace and their main competitor. They will have access to Yahoo’s inventory while making money off them at the same time. This agreement also puts an even larger portion of search in Google’s hands.

For Yahoo!, this gives them access to Google’s technology and will allow them to display more relevant search results, which in turn should generate more clicks and ad spend from advertisers. Yahoo! expects this deal to generate an estimated $240 to $450 million in operating cash flow.

According to Google, this should turn out to be a great deal for users of Yahoo and Google. Advertisers will have a better opportunity to reach their target audience more efficiently and consumers will be able to see more relevant ads when searching.

Hopefully, Yahoo! will take advantage of this agreement and use the extra operating cash flow to move their technology forward and improve their search services to Advertisers, Publishers and Consumers.