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.

For all you fledgling internet barons out there – your real estate is about to increase in value (and cost). Starting July 1, pricing on .NET and .COM extensions are increasing. Reasoning is hard to come buy. VeriSign, the organization who manages the registry for those extensions merely announced that prices are increasing (so get over it).

Before you get too bent out of shape – the effects are minimal, 10% increase for .NET, 7% increase for .COM – keeping both likely within the $10 range for new domains. The best plan for beating the spike is obviously to renew any domains you plan on keeping now – and maybe decide to snatch up the ones you have been considering.

Techbargains.com compiled a handy little list of coupons for registering cheaply before the hike:

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Unlike messy search engines that force you to spend time looking though pages of results for one piece of information, WhitePages may become your new solution. When I found out the online directory just announced its new version of WhitePages Business Search, I was immediately interested and wanted to know more. After all, features include people search, reverse phone and address lookup and a store locator, all of which are available for mobile.

After I got over the initial shock of finding my own name and address on the “People” tab of the site, I decided to look for an actual business. I searched for a few of my favorite places around Denver and even downloaded the free app on my Droid. In my short time using both the app and site, this is what I thought…

Pros:
•Good if you know exactly what you’re looking for and just want to get a phone number or address.
•You can text the listing to a phone if a friend doesn’t have access to mobile web both from the site and the app. Plus, you can choose to add the listing to your contacts if you need it.
•The Store Locator can be useful especially when you’re searching for larger brand names.

Cons:
•Limited content. It doesn’t really help if you want more details on services provided or lots of menu options. However, if you know a little about local advertising and have already provided detailed content on sites like SuperPages or YellowPages, some of that content is pulled into WhitePages if you search by keyword or category.
•No review space. Can’t read ‘em, can’t write ‘em.

Suggestions for Users:
Try it out. See what you like. If anything, you can take a break from stalking people on Facebook and find out where they live instead.

A month or so ago Steve Jobs from Apple posted an open letter to explain why the iPod and the iPad do not and will not support Flash. To paraphrase, it is because it is a proprietary 3rd party closed source development tool. Adobe can update Flash at any time and if your hardware or applications can’t support the update it can become redundant. There are also serious concerns over the security of Flash.

I have to agree with Job’s sentiments and businesses should always be wary about relying on 3rd party systems to support application development.

Last week I received an email from Yahoo about their “wizz bang” (quotations mean sarcasm) Desktop Tool and the platform it is built on – Adobe Air.

Dear Advertiser,

As you know, Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop uses Adobe AIR as the platform from which we run the application. Recently, Adobe launched Version 2.0 of AIR, but at this time it is not yet supported by the Search Marketing Desktop. Using Version 2.0 at this time may cause errors in the SMD application.

Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing

Too late, I updated Adobe Air when I started up TweetDeck the week before and I am not going to waste my time reverting it. YSM, and its decision to go with style over speed and functionality (that’s all I see their choice to build on the Air platform to be) has now put them in a hole. We still don’t know if the AdCenter Desktop or the Yahoo Desktop will become the successful tool for the merger, but it’s pretty obvious that it will be the Microsoft version since it’s built on the Office platform and Microsoft control their own development environments.

I can’t see Yahoo scrambling to update the YSM Desktop, and I can barely be bothered to use the tool anyway, but they should have known better in the first place since they have been around this industry long enough.

Everyone has seen those books “for dummies” – Windows for Dummies, Excel for Dummies, Programming for Dummies, Washing Underwear for Highschool Dummies. Well I have to agree with the concept that most things in life need to be documented as if the person reading it has had no experience or is a complete idiot (usually it’s just the former).

Take me for example. I am driving to L.A this weekend to pick up my dog who is being shipped in from Australia. Having never been through this process before, I asked the people handling the shipping to send me a document about what to expect at LAX in terms of where to go to pick him up and what happens in the Customs office. I was sent a one page document telling me where Qantas freight was located and basically if we don’t pick up our unattended luggage a storage fee would apply (plus a really confusing map of where they are located). I had to email them back and say – can you explain step by step what we will need to do in a document that is titled “Picking up your pets at LAX – the Idiots Guide”.

I know if we don’t have this explained to us before we start off on our journey around LAX it’s going to lead to a cat fight in the front cab of my F150 even before the dog is on board.

This thought process needs to be applied when you are either explaining or training clients and/or new team members. For most people the terminology of PPC is unfamiliar and so are all the tools needed to get the task done. The hardest part about any new job is learning the language of the job, like acronyms for example.

Start from Year 0 when documenting even a seemingly simple procedure. Any good technical documentation assumes nothing, and it allows a person to pick up the procedure at the point where they are comfortable. Illustrations need to be helpful, not just pretty. I worked out the map for the Qantas freight office was basically upside down, South was at the top of the map. Always work with familiar if possible. Never use East, West or South as the top of a map because people will always start with the blind assumption that the top is North. Same can be said for your pretty desktop themes, Firefox themes etc. If you are creating formal documentation use a standard Windows or Mac theme when inserting screenshots.

Each step needs to be documented separately and show the results of the steps if possible. For example if I were to document a campaign set up for Adwords Editor in a Client Center environment, it would look like the following.

Windows:
When creating a new campaign in AdWords Editor an account for the client first needs to be created on the web interface of Google AdWords in the My Client Center tab. If your client account has already been created you can then proceed with the following steps.
1. On your computer go to Start -> Programs -> Google AdWords Editor and open.
2. To open an account go to File -> Open Account

Open an AdWords Account

…. and so on.

If you’ve used AdWords as much as I have, this seems overly simple. But in the next few weeks I will need to train someone, who has never used it before, how to set up a campaign in AdWords. If I trained them without these simple steps documented they could get stuck on the easiest thing, just because I didn’t point it out. Then they’re sitting there for 5-10 minutes trying to work it out on their own, which is a complete waste of time.

You also need to use this strategy when speaking to most clients about what you are doing. So many of my clients have a basic understanding of what paid search advertising is, but they still won’t know many of the acronyms of our industry, the tools we use or why something will go wrong with their campaign. If you need to explain something to a client it is probably best to do it over email first (let them know you’re writing everything down for your benefit as much as theirs) and then follow up with a phone call if they want a certain point explained to them.

For any industry, patience is a key factor when dealing with clients, but I have found that in Internet Advertising you are dealing with so many people who need to jump in on this for their business (small or large) sake, it is even more imperative to document and explain as carefully and as simply as possible. We actually work in a small industry in terms of who has an expansive knowledge of what happens and how it happens so most of our language is foreign to even traditional advertising agencies.

So document with patience, teach with patience, and write it ALL down.

I severely dislike using MS adCenter Desktop. Actually I’ll just say it. I hate it.

Recently, after importing a campaign from Google, I tried to delete keyword URLs en mass by clicking on the Keywords tab at the account level, changing my column view to show the Destination URL and then sorting that column. Every which way I tried to sort, adCenter crashed. Then as I gave up on sorting the column (I even exported to Excel and then tried to re-import – and it crashed) I decided to scroll through my 65K + keyword list to just delete the keyword URLs as I came across them.

Getting impatient I started to highlight 2 keywords at a time, but the Desktop tool doesn’t allow you to just delete the (varies) note in the Destination URL field, so I tried to populate it with something else. It crashed.

Starting it up again for the hundredth time I decided to be patient and try deleting them one at a time… again. And it crashed.

If adCenter is the future of the Search Alliance then they better pull what ever team supposedly fixed Vista with Windows 7 (I am Apple and a Dock was my idea), and put them to work on this big fat useless piece of crap that has never made an account manager’s life easy.

I need to go and apologise to my mouse who is now recovering in Intensive IT Room Care after I smashed on my desk a couple of hundred times (about the same amount of times Desktop has crashed on me today).

Unfortunately I have to still delete these destination URL parameters from the keywords, so there better be a few mice on standby,

It’s already April 1st in Australia but this does not seem like a great April Fools Day joke on behalf of Google. They have declared that they are exiting the Australian market effective immediately, citing the Australian Governments proposed internet filter. Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, was quoted as saying “We’ve already left China. That was clearly not a bluff and besides I couldn’t take the food anyway.”

Google is Goooooooone

He did commiserate on the closing of the actual Google office “It’s a shame because our Sydney office has really nice views of the harbour. And have you seen our kitchen? I suppose Fairfax will want it now. Well, what’s left of it anyway.” I have visited the Australian Google office – and I’d have to agree with his sentiments.

Now I do recall some great news headlines in Australia on Aprils Fools Day, and this could be one of them, but the Australian Government should be wary even if it is simply a joke.

The Internet filter could deny Australians access to material such as videos of political assassinations, graffiti art tutorials and drug use. This would be a blow to the westies, bogans, ferals and other parts of society who routinely plot assassinations of our top political officials on the side of the Parramatta to St Leonards train while smoking their home grown hydroponic pot. For the rest of us Australians is just censorship.

Not that us Aussies are not used to the Government stepping in to protect our beer bludgeoned senses. In 1907 a bushranger film The Story of The Kelly Gang was banned because of…well, bushranger content and most recent times even films like A Nightmare on Elm Street III was banned for a period of time as was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and the American indie flick Ken Park. I do remember the former Prime Minister, John “Little Bush” Howard, also tried, unsuccessfully to have Lolita banned as well.

I’ll wait a day to see if this is true. To me it smells like a bad joke, but with Google having made threats in the past month over the internet filter we won’t know until later today or tomorrow.

Admittedly – I am just not ‘that into’ social media. Whoawhoa – hold it with the stone throwing! Stay with me here. Yes, I absolutely agree the concept as a whole is invaluable across many facets of life. The ability to create a network of friends and like-minded people without the limitation of geography is amazing. To be able to communicate and share your personal voice and opinions across the globe is mind-blowing. …but I’m starting to feel like: SO WHAT?! – all anybody does is waste time! 98% of people are using social media to talk about something completely inane! (not an actual statistic) “Ooh I scored three rutabagas in Farmville!  I took the What New Moon character are you – I’m Jacob! Here’s a photo of my breakfast!”

Full disclosure – I don’t technically have a Facebook. My cat does. Why him? Because he doesn’t have any embarrassing junior high photos, and then I have a fall back when that gotta-do-it-via-Facebook need arrives. Yes, even though I loathe Facebook, I am finding myself often shunned for not having a profile. People ask me why, and I think the best reason is…I just don’t want one!

However, apparently, I’m not alone in my feelings that social media is just…stupid. I came across this article from a fellow self-proclaimed heretic: Why I Hate Social Media by Matt Jones. Matt seems to feel as annoyed and bothered as I do. Are we over emphasizing the importance of social media, when we should be coming to the realization that we simply are using it as a new (and cheaper) medium to emphasize strategies that have always worked? As Matt puts it:

“The question for us all right now (and I include my own agency) is: What would happen if we acted on the implications of social media, rather than just use it as cheap media? What if we recognized that social media is really only shorthand for the multi-channel, hyper-connected, user-generated, co-created, always-on world we now live in — a world where the good gets what it deserves and so does the bad? What if we stopped getting all hot and heavy over the latest new media success stories du jour, and starting realizing that the real triumph of, say, the Obama campaign was the product and the story, not the channel used for storytelling? What if we took the social media “revolution” as our cue to stop creating tactical campaigns focused on amplifying our same-same stories and start creating better stuff and better stories to tell? What if we got really bold, and focused on creating products and services so inspired that “social” media does all our storytelling for us?”

Beautiful. Couldn’t have said it better myself (no really, I tried all day yesterday).

So maybe we should all just shut up about ‘social media’ and remember real marketing. The idea should always be that no matter the medium, you should be creating user-focused campaigns that create a holistic brand experience; in turn driving brand evangelism and natural positive conversation about your brand.

What are your thoughts? Am I overreacting? Is it weird and silly that I have a Twitter account but won’t bring myself to create a Facebook profile? …and just for reassurance, I am not a part of our social media team.

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

**A quick update to this post, a day after I published this we were visited by our Google team and they presented a new content network strategy. It is to only have 2-4 keywords per ad group with many, many ad groups to cover all of your tightly themed keywords. I ran back to my desk to try it out. I am still waiting to see the results, but its pretty much a given that you’ll hear about it from me one way or another.

###So I have seen the results and I have a nice bruise on my forehead from hitting my desk repeatedly with it. I am about to give up. The Google reps themselves admitted that its taken some time and testing to find out what works for Content advertising. I think they still have some way to go.

I have been running campaigns on the Google content network for a couple of years now, both text ads and display advertising, but lately I am finding it increasingly frustrating as Google doesn’t seem to apply the same laborious standard to screening and categorising new sites as they do when reviewing ads (I am still waiting a week for some ads to be reviewed).

For example, one very business oriented campaign running on the network has the following topics excluded:

• Error pages
• Parked domains
• Games
• Sexually suggestive content
• Military & international conflict
• Juvenile, gross & bizarre content
• Profanity & rough language
• Death & tragedy
• Image-sharing pages
• Social networks
• Video-sharing pages

Today I had to manually exclude the following sites from my campaign that would have easily fallen into the categories above:

• drugrunners.net (titled: A disturbing game of torture and death)
• MySpace.com
• justhelicopters.com
• onemanga.com

I did speak to our account representative at Google about these sites and was suggested that some tighter exclusions needed to be made. This means going in and excluding certain placements (categories). For anyone attempting to run a Content campaign on Google without the help of Google reps, this seems a little unfair.

Google’s AdWords help says there a several levels of automated and manual scrutiny applied when a site joins the network and even with this there may be a chance that adding these categories to the exclusion list will not always cover all sites of similar content on their network. The new web interface doesn’t allow you to manage category exclusions easily either (that is, when you go into the Ad Placement Tool and select web pages to target by categories, but are unable to exclude), so you need to manually enter them into the placement exclusion tool at the bottom of your Networks tab. For example category::Internet>>Online Goodies>>Skins Themes & Screensavers.

You can still grab some quality traffic off the network so running a content campaign is not a complete waste of time, but be prepared to spend some time excluding sites that have no business displaying your ads. This is a longer process than building out a negative keyword list for a search campaign because a URL doesn’t always tell you what the site actually contains.

Personally I am at the point of categorizing it with Yahoo’s network quality.