The team at Microsoft have been busy working on updating their Desktop application for the MS AdCenter advertising platform in the recent months. If anyone read one of my earlier posts 10 Ways to Make AdCenter Desktop Crash they may have noticed that a few members of the Desktop team commented on it asking me to contact them to follow up on the issues I was having.

I am still not a huge fan of the Desktop tool but I have remained in contact with the developers who reached out to me to follow up on any fixes and new features. They are trying very hard to make it a usable application and with large agency accounts soon to be merged for the alliance they know that it will be more commonly used in the near future.

So the other week I upgraded the app when I was prompted to. Immediately I ran in to sync issues. I had spent an hour or so updating ad copy for a larger campaign and then when I went to Sync the changes I received an internal error. I exported the changes and then tried to restore the campaign. Internal Error. I passed this information on to the MS development team and they worked that week to fix the sync issues.

I ended up uninstalling the Desktop last week and re-installing it this week. One change I noticed was the installation file either installed SQL Server 2008 or at the very least updated it.

Opening up an account has changed in the fact that when you have chosen an account to add (from the very last button on the Home ribbon and in my opinion the location of this action needs to be changed, although I did add it to the quick access toolbar) you will be shown the size of the account and a warning that your database has a maximum size of 4GB. This obviously goes along with my mention of the SQL database above.

Database Capacity

Once you have an account downloaded you can now changed bids en mass when selecting multiple ad groups in a campaign. You will notice that the “3rd State” still exists. That is, when you select multiple ad groups the Ad Distribution controls will be filled in for both Search and Content. After discussing this with the development team, this is because they only pull certain data from the AdCenter database into your database. Whenever you transfer data there is an expense associated with it and to manage this cost they set edit controls to an unknown state. They are, however, thinking about ways to deal with this.

When you make a change in an ad group the right navigation bar will now reflect this change (by making the ad group bold) but it will not do this straight away, I had to click away from the campaign into another campaign and then back into the campaign where I made a change in the ad group.

They have worked on displaying errors. Previously if there was an issue with anything in the account you had to go hunting for where the error was, it was not intuitive enough to display a symbol (or anything) in the left navigation bar so you could easily identify which campaign, ad group, keyword or ad returned an error.

Now the account, campaign and ad group in the left navigation pane displays a red cross symbol and the tabs to navigate between Ad Groups, Text Ads, Mobile Ads and Keywords will display the same red cross. You will also see a big red bar across the top of the Manager pane and it allows you to go directly to the errors by clicking on the View Errors button.

Navigation Bar Error

Navigation Tab Error

Quick Error Link

I had mentioned to them at the start of June that I would like to only sync one campaign, if needed, within an account. At the time they said that they had added the feature and it would go out in the next release. This is now found in the Sync Settings button, next to the Syn Changes button. I selected one campaign (out of about 50) and received a curious warning about unsubscribing other accounts that may contain unposted data, with no option to show the warning again. You then have to click the Sync Changes button after changing the settings.

Sync Settings

Sync Warning

So after syncing those changes you would have to go back into Sync Settings and reselect the entire account again if you wanted to Sync any further changes in other campaigns. I closed down the application and reopened it to see if it restored to what I consider the default sync settings of all campaigns, but it retained the settings I selected earlier.

This processes is a little cumbersome and could be refined to one dialogue screen before you actually hit the Go button to sync. I’ll always make changes to a campaign where I have run out of time, but want to post what I managed to do and pick up on the rest of the changes later. Also I am great at forgetting I changed a setting somewhere so there may be a few frustrated words when I try and sync something and it’s not in my subscribed campaign list.

The application is definitely getting there and it will be interesting to see how much it changes in the next 6 months as the Search Alliance goes into full swing. At least the development team is all ears and is open to discussing possible solutions and alternate methods for the everyday tasks of an account manager.

Because of how PPC ads are displayed if your ad (Heaven forbid!) is shown outside of positions 1-3 or if the search engine displays most ads to the side, try to avoid copy that wraps from line 1 to line 2. Instead test ads that have 2 stand-alone lines of copy.

For example, if you started with:

{KeyWord: Business College}
Start Your Career In Business
Management. Classes Start Soon!
www.BusinessCollege.edu

Then try testing:

{KeyWord: Business College}
Start Your Career In Business.
Request Info, Classes Start Soon!
www.BusinessCollege.edu

That way you ensure your ads will read well and be less awkward no matter where they are displayed.

On a call with our Yahoo reps last week they provided an overview of updates to the “new” Yahoo Search Marketing Desktop which included:

• Increase & Decrease Bids by percentages
• Download Specific Campaigns
• Cut, Copy, Paste
• Find & Replace
• Faster Downloads!

This did nothing to boost my confidence in the application since the actual speed of navigating and working within it when I first reviewed it produced quite a few Australian and worldly expletives and I haven’t opened the tool since.

So when I had to do some ad copy and bid optimizations for a campaign this morning in Yahoo I decided to upgrade and try out the new version.

Starting up the application produced an upgrade message (at least they got that part right). I selected to upgrade and it went through the motions of downloading then installing. I never got past that point. I received an error, not a very informative error either (did I expect transparency from Yahoo all of a sudden?).

Search Marketing Desktop Upgrade Error

Clicking close produced the upgrade message again and not having had a full cup of coffee yet I decided to try it again and received the same error message. To get out of the loop I had to select to “Upgrade Later” and start the original application. After closing it without bothering to work in it, I uninstalled the old version and installed the new version from scratch. This all went according to plan, everything installed without error.

Then I tried to start the application. Something happened, a blip maybe, but no actual desktop tool appeared. Dipping into my vast IT knowledge (no I am not being facetious – I used to be a system admin and provide network support) I checked the Task Manager and found the process, not that it was actually doing anything. End Process (twice) finally killed it and I tried starting it again. That worked.

After logging in and selecting the appropriate market I was able to download my accounts from a *gasp* alphabetically ordered list. It gives you the option to only download the basic account data at the bottom of the dialogue box (with no explanation) so I ticked this hoping that maybe it meant it wouldn’t download impression and click stats. It only downloaded the name of the account. No keywords, no ads, no ad groups. Insert worldly expletive. What is the (worldly expletive) point?

So I go back to the Get Account dialogue box, ignore the basic data check box and try again to download the account. Success.

At first glance the application is a lot faster to navigate around and I am not receiving an error message to fix my display URLs (changing them from Proper case to all lower case) which is the first thing I noticed on the previous version.

I was going to change a few display URLs anyway, but I found when I selected more than one ad instead of showing me which parts of the ads varied with a and which parts were the same (as AdWords Editor does), it gave me for all fields. Changing my ad copy and display URLs was still a tiny bit slow but right now I can’t figure out whether it’s my computer or the application.

I changed 8 ads, and optimized bids in 4 ad groups. As the layout is a little different to AdWords (when I select an ad group from the left navigation pane you only see a Keywords and Ads tab to work with) it took me a half a minute to figure out how to change the default ad group bid. Either go back up to the Campaign Level or Account level and you will see a Ad Groups tab or stay in the Ad Group level and at the bottom of the navigation pane is the Ad Group Details dialogue box and a little Edit link.

Edit Ad Group Details

Another task I wanted to do was review the negative keywords assigned to each ad group and the account as a whole but no-where in the Desktop interface could I locate where these keywords were. So I gave up to upload my changes to bids and ads. Now apparently there were errors with my changes that had to do with something in my Ad Groups – but I am not told of what exactly the errors are so I had to hunt to find them. Until I chose to “Post Changes” nothing in the tool made me aware of this.

Going up to the Ad Group level I found the little error exclamation icons when I clicked on the Ad Groups tab. This should really be displayed in the navigation pane with a explanation of the error. Clicking on the Ad Groups to see if I did get an explanation of the error resulted in the icons disappearing. So I decided to Post Changes again to see if the errors would re-occur, they didn’t and I was able to post successfully and quickly.

Overall the speed of the application has vastly improved. I really only downloaded a smaller campaign so I am curious to see how the tool (and my computer) will handle the massive Westwood campaigns I work on. I will definitely be using it now and although there are some issues they still need to fix, they have managed to improve it with one upgrade in a short amount of time so I would imagine that another one in on it’s way in the next month or so.

Jared Schroder, Location3 Media’s director of paid search and resident karaoke champ, discusses a couple recent topics in the SEM industry: Google’s new sitelinks feature for paid search ads; and what the Search Alliance will mean for the SEM industry. Jared also discusses an interesting approach he and his team have come up with for travel industry campaigns. And he ends with a helpful tip for all search marketers out there.

At Google’s ThinkEducation workshop in NYC yesterday, we were asked to hold back our tweets, texts and blogs until the new AdWords Search Funnel reporting was officially announced on Inside AdWords: “AdWords Search Funnels are a set of reports describing the ad click and impression behavior on Google.com that leads up to a conversion.”

There are 7 Search Funnel reports consisting of:

1. Top conversions
2. Assist clicks & impressions – with counts and ratios to last click
3. Assist conversions
4. 1st click analysis
5. Last click analysis
6. Top paths – what keywords (including match types) were searched in sequential order
7. Time lag
8. Path length – how many clicks (1-12+) before a conversion and what percentage of conversions did each drive

This is a beta, but it’s a public one so you don’t have to opt in. It’s a rolling public launch that AdWords users will start to see in their accounts within the next month. Look for it in the Reporting tab. (I am pleased to already see it this morning in some of my accounts.) It requires Conversion Tracking to work, or you can import goals or transactions into your AdWords account from Google Analytics.

It does not include data from Google search partners or the Content Network, but the Googler presenting yesterday told us that could be incorporated soon. The reports are also limited to data up to 30 days prior to the conversion. So, depending on the sales cycle for your client’s product or service, this time frame may or may not be incredibly useful. The data is also fully exportable like other AdWords reports.

While indeed a beta and not without limitations, these reports still provide some exciting insights and actionable data into user search behavior.

Recently I suggested to a long term client that they should run a YouTube Promoted Video campaign as they already had a substantial library of videos on their channel and offered it as a way to drive traffic to the channel and perhaps get one or two conversions per month along the way. So far this month we have seen two conversions with a cost per lead of $12.00 (which is significantly less than the goal CPL).

The beauty of YouTube promoted videos is that it is based on search keywords which cost a fraction of normal Google search bids and, as it is set up from your Adwords interface, it’s very easy to manage.

YouTube Promoted Videos Results

Setting Your Campaign Up
From the web interface create a new CPC Campaign – I see no point in creating it in the Editor, unless you are creating quite a few ad groups at once, as the ad creation process needs to be done from the web interface.

There is no special targeting required as the type of ad you create will determine the placement on YouTube’s search results.

Create Your Ad Groups.
As Promoted Video campaigns seem to ignore the Quality Score you don’t need to set up too many ad groups unless your client is all over the shop when it comes to topics covered by their videos. For example, a pet store may have videos of cats, dogs, fish, bunnies, kittens, puppies, reptiles and anything else they stock. So perhaps you may like to run a specific ad for each of those, therefore you would create an ad group for each type of pet.

My clients have only one or two offerings so I run only one or two ad groups.

Set your default search bids. This involves a little bit of trial and error. One of my clients has a normal Google search bid average of around $15 (oh yes), but for YouTube I started them on 0.25c and have since bumped them up to 0.55c.

Add Your Keywords
Promoted Videos requires a departure from your normal keyword selection. Terms have to be very broad and there should be no long tail keyword phrases. For example you may have a client that offers luxury Bahama vacations, but in this case you would simply bid on the keywords bahamas, caribbean, bahama hotels etc.

Your pet store ad groups would use keywords like kitten, cat, funny cats, funny kittens, dog, puppy, puppies etc.

Remember you a catering to a different type of search user who will probably try to find the genre of videos through one or two words.

Create Your Ad
From the Ads tab in each ad group on the web interface select “New Ad” and “Display ad builder”. On the right hand side of the screen that opens you can select from a range of Categories. Choose “Audio and Video”.

YouTube Promoted Videos will be the first of four choices displayed. Click “Choose” and a new dialogue screen will open.

1. Name your ad (if you know which video you are going to use from the YouTube Channel then use it’s title)
2. Headline, Description 1 and Description 2 follow the same formatting of a standard Google text ad. I generally use the text that converts the best from my normal search campaign. Remember you can always A/B test.
3. Select your video from the YouTube Channel you are promoting (basically you need to search for it and it will show which videos are available). As you are appealing to an audience looking for a visual cue, choose a video where one of the frames selected … well, appeals (i.e. a kitten’s face rather than a kitten’s bum).
4. As mentioned in the previous point you can select from 4 frames to display in your ad. (again, face v bum)
5. You then can select whether the viewer, who clicks on the ad, watches it on the standard YouTube watch page or the Channel page that you are promoting.
6. Click Save.
7. You can then preview the ad from the Ads tab interface.

Select a YouTube Video

Promoted Videos Preview

Play around with your search bids, it’s not hard to make it to the top of the promoted video list with a 5c or 10c change in bids.

Don’t expect many conversions. A YouTube searcher typically does not set out to find information about a particular company or product. They seem to want to hear and see the stories of other people. If those stories are compelling then they may, as a bi-product, search out more information about your company. Fortunately the current low cost of Promoted Videos allows for this.

It might feel more natural with a campaign that you’re launching or taking over with fresh eyes, but a long-term campaign can benefit just as much from looking at your PPC data from new angles.

• Do you compare your data this week to last week and also to last month’s or last quarter’s weekly average? How about this week last year? How have the last six Tuesdays  performed?
• You may already be watching your data from a day of week & time of day perspective, but how about also for individual engines? Or also for branded vs. un-branded kewords?
• Hopefully you’re monitoring overall conversion rates, but how about for each type of conversion? How about conversion rates by match type?
• Are you checking referrer URL data and search query reports regularly?

These are just a few ideas, of course. There are a myriad of ways to play with your data and each new angle is sure to provide insight into your campaign performance. So go slice and dice it. You’ll likely come away with some great actionable data,  sound smart when you tell your PPC agency friends what you found and have a snazzy new chart to share with your clients.

Every day I am looking at my search query reports on Google to exclude keywords that seem to cost a filthy fortune and occasionally add a few terms that even I haven’t thought of. Broad matching and bad spelling at least make pouring through these reports a bit of a giggle-fest if I am in a decent mood. Here are a few recent discoveries:

Broad Matches
I am pretty sure that Google’s broad matching has changed in the last 6 month and I am finding queries on a daily basis that I have to roll my eyes at:

• what kind of continue training in technology can you imagine would be required as you progress in top ten career of today – I wonder if Google had a conversation back to this person?
• www atmark train com – a broad match to IT training perhaps?
• i love college music songs – a broad match to IT college I am guessing
• get pregnant games online – I am not questioning Google’s matching here – I just find it odd that people are searching on this
• do something fun online – a broad match to an online training keyword
• make your own jacket – broad matched to make your own game
• can i become a witch – I’m sure you can sweetie – but you don’t need a degree, thanks for clicking… (rhymes with witch)
• is homework necessary yes it is – I’m a little tired of this by now

Bad Spelling
Seareously… can no won get enything rite:

• vertual games
• jogos oline do crash
• schdel
• dersup gams
• makeing games – really… you never learnt to drop the “e” ?
• cretors dowloeds
• teche elementary – Please don’t – the kids have a hard enough time in school

With adCenter to take center stage for account managers when the Yahoo! / Bing search merger becomes a  reality, it will be interesting to see if Microsoft will invest the money into both the web and desktop interfaces to make it competitive with AdWords.

Google is usually the first choice for running advertising campaigns due to the sheer volume of search queries they process every day. Yahoo! and Bing both deliver some good results, with Yahoo! having the ability to match Google in terms of lead volume for campaigns. However, with their advanced-standard match process and some painful trademark rules, your keyword lists are usually a fraction of your Google build outs.

The other reason why AdWords is the first choice is because it is simple, fast and comparatively transparent.  Unless Microsoft pulls a Windows 7 Dock (I’m a Mac and Windows stole my idea) on it’s adCenter interface and editor, campaigns will remain imports of our already built Google campaigns.

The adCenter web interface is not a lost cause and neither is the Desktop. After downloading the Yahoo! Desktop Editor and trying to do even the most simple task, then eventually giving up due to speed and other things, I now have new respect for adCenter’s Desktop.

Reports

The web interface offers a Search Query Report, which is an essential tool for anyone running broad match keywords. From the Reports tab in your account, select Search Query Performance.  Choose Specific Accounts, Campaigns and Ad Group for the Report Scope (if you run campaigns for multiple clients). The account that you reached the Report Center from should already be selected. Expand the Change Columns and Layout section. Here you can add and remove columns for the data you want to see (although a few core data sets can’t be removed).  Conversions are not selected as a default so if you are running a lead based campaign you should add this in to the report.

You can filter the report further but these are hard coded options rather than custom parameters like in AdWords. Once you have created the report it will display in your web browser and you then have the option to download it as a CSV or Zipped CSV. I find the web interface version of the report hard to read and there isn’t anything that you can do with the report within the interface (you can’t assign negatives or add relevant keywords to an ad group) so I just download it as a CSV.  They do have a little graph you can play around with but unless you are running only 15 keywords it is redundant.

One of the nice things about adCenter’s broad matching technology is that it doesn’t get too silly (unlike some recent search query results in Google) and I don’t end up deleting/excluding too many keywords.

Tools

In the Tools tab of the Web Interface is a download for Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, which is an addon to MS Excel. Once downloade,d this tool allows you to research keywords (traffic, demographics, categories), generate keywords (extraction, suggestions, popular) and look up pricing and vertical KPIs.

MS AdCenter's Ad Intelligence Tab

I have played around with the keyword generation through the Wizard, which allows you to create keyword lists from an Excel list that you may have and extract terms from a website or a specific vertical. The actual Wizard is fairly simple (and rather sparse) and the website extraction pulls keywords that I didn’t know were on the site but not quite relevant. Then the wizard will ask you how you would like to expand on this list, via the customer’s bidding behavior or by suggesting queries which contain the original keyword.

I chose to go with Queries that Contain Your Keyword. Because my client’s website has a case study on the home page and it mentions the word “additional” the keyword tool suggested (among many other irrelevant queries) “patrick chan joubert additional twist specific value.” Hmmm. Luckily adCenter’s broad matching algorithm doesn’t quite go that far (I wouldn’t put it past Google’s though).  In comparison to Google’s keyword tool (based on a URL) there are too many far fetched queries to be trolling through.

There is a third step to the Wizard though and that is Keyword KPIs. You have two options at this stage: 1. viewing monthly traffic or 2. monetization (including CPC, CTR, impressions and clicks). I chose the latter and was pleasantly surprised by the final Excel report that was generated.  Even though there are plenty of suggestions that are useless it still gives you an insight into which search terms generate traffic on Bing and their average CTR and CPC.

Keyword KPI's Ad Intelligence Report

The Popular Keywords button in the the main toolbar is pretty cool; it allows you to research spikes in search queries, top keyword searches (apparently in the Exotic Pets vertical monkey terms are a big hit on Bing), top keywords by domain (still figuring this out), and Top Vertical lists (I kept receiving an error every time I tried).

For the other tools you need to have a populated data sheet to run the queries. As I like to work in Excel when building out keyword lists (for concatenation) I will probably give AI a proper go in my next campaign build to see if it is really worth the effort.

I bid optimize on the web interface mainly because I can quickly view the average position, average cost per click and the spend for a couple of different date ranges.

On occasion I reset an ad groups bids back to default. This usually happens when I have upped the default bid higher than most of the previous specific bids (that were higher than the old default bid).

The easiest way to do this is to select all the keywords:

Select All Keywords in an Ad Group

Choose Edit – In Table:

Edit Keywords in a Table

When you’re in the table view the default bid is shown as blank. Set the first keyword in the table to blank and then click on a little note like icon will appear when you hover over a bid field and this will populate all of your bids with that specific bid. All bid fields should go blank. Click Save.

Set Keyword Bids to the Default Bid

Note: This will only edit the keywords shown in the view. To edit all keywords at one time you need to Edit in Spreadsheet without selecting all the keywords (this will open your keywords and their parameters in a Google Docs spreadsheet). Otherwise with the Edit in Table, once you hit save the interface will take you back to the Keywords tab and you have to go to the next page and repeat the process.