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All About Microsoft adCenter’s adExcellence Program

July 26, 2007

Microsoft’s adExcellence program is similiar to the Yahoo Ambassador or the Google AdWords Professional program.

The program is still in beta, however, to quality for the program one must pass a test and have a minimum amount of spend (which is pretty low) in an account to quality for the program.

The original test wasn’t extremely difficult, and I’ve already talked to Microsoft about some of the questions and changing them up a bit. Many of the items were around PPC best practices; which is good to see as I don’t think everything on the test should be centered around just one product; but around how a good PPC campaign is setup and managed.

One item Microsoft is set on doing (and the other engines need to follow suit) is creating a directory of it’s members.

These certifications don’t mean much (nor does any certification) without awareness. While I applaud the engines for creating programs that lets consumers know if one is qualified, the consumer awareness about these programs is exceptionally low. Hence, consumers don’t actually seek out these professionals to run their campaigns.

Engines should showcase these programs to raise awareness. Once their is awareness, then there is also an additional benefit for one to learn any of the PPC programs to the satisfaction of the engine to earn one’s qualification.

The second items the engines need to follow up with is support for the individuals who pass these programs. People who take (and pass) these programs are the most likely candidates for being product evangelists.

At present, there is no special contact phone number, email address, or skywriting for one who has any of the search engine qualifications. If one happens to be on another team, then one can get support through the normal channels. However, if one does not have an account rep, then one still has to go through the normal channels for support. These programs and qualifiers should be embraced by the engines.

Yahoo is currently in the process of restructuring their ambassador program; and Microsoft is still in beta, so maybe there is hope that some of these support channels will begin to emerge.

A Look into adCenter’s Quality Score Rankings

May 8, 2007

Quality score remains one of the more ambiguous ideas on the web. Google has become much more transparent with sharing information about AdWords quality score.

Microsoft adCenter has also announced it will use a quality score formula to determine placement. I’ve had some discussions with Microsoft digging into the full algo, however, here are some high level facts that will help you optimize for adCenter’s quality score.

• How closely related the keyword is to the ad’s content (single factor)
• How closely related the query is to the landing page (single factor)
• How closely related the keyword is to both the ad and landing page (combined factor)
• The serial chain of query to ad and then ad to landing page
• Uniqueness of the ad to other ads on the page. adCenter tries not to show duplicate ads on the page (this is an interesting one).

Overall, it’s fairly similar to Google’s.

The concept is quite simple: If you are enhancing the search process, then ads rank well. If you aren’t, then ads rank lower.

adCenter announces Upgrade

April 25, 2007

We’re now taking the next step forward. On Thursday, April 26, 2007, the current adCenter site will be upgraded with these new features, including:

• Improved navigation. Easily go to any campaign or ad group in your account via our navigation enhancements.
• Bulk edit keyword settings. Quickly make updates to negative keywords, dynamic text and destination URLs for all of your keywords.
• Enhanced campaign imports. Import new campaigns or make updates to existing campaigns with our new, robust, import feature.
• Microsoft Excel download option. You can now download all of the adCenter data sets in an Excel format.
• Full text search. From any page, find campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads that contain all or part of a search query string by using our new full text search feature.
• And more! Watch our webinar to learn more about how to make the most of these new features.

Source: adCenter blog

Microsoft adCenter Dynamic URLs

March 12, 2007

adCenter has some very powerful dynamic insertion commands for automatically passing data to an advertiser about a search click.

I wrote about their initial options a while ago when their dynamic functionality became stronger than Google’s dynamic link insertion.

adCenter recently updated their blog to go into some depth about passing these query strings. If you’re using dynamic link building, the entry is worth a read.

adLabs “Keyword Group Detector”

February 25, 2007

The first step to good keyword organization is to identify your ad groups. Microsoft’s adLabs has a nice tool in helping to first determine your ad groups.

The Keyword Group Detector tool lets one input a keyword and then see the related items to that keyword.

It’s similar to the often forgotten Google Sets project.

This can be very useful for finding related keywords, or starting to group similar words together.

A search for a word like ‘marketing’ will bring back related words such as advertising, ads, etc. Words that are more likely to be adjectives than ad groups.

A search for a more commercial term such as ‘ipod’, brings back ‘ipod mini’, “i-pod shuffle”, “apple i pod”. These different terms are better served in their own ad group.

The tool works off of sorting data, so it doesn’t care about spellings. Some will like this as it’s the reality of searches. Other’s won’t like this as they don’t want to make ad groups from misspellings. Either way, be aware that some of the keywords will be either misspelled or jargon.

In the above example, “ipod” can be seen to be spelled as: i pod, ipod, and i-pod. It is important to understand those are the words being searched even if they don’t translate into being an ad group.

If you are just starting down the road of organizing keywords, this can be a useful tool to do some research.

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