December 8, 2010 By 11 Comments

Google AdWords vs MSN adCenter – Comparison Chart

Now that the Search Alliance transition is complete, MSN is now the second largest search company, as Bing-powered searches account for nearly 28 percent of the market and Microsoft adCenter powers all paid search advertising on Bing and Yahoo.

In short, adCenter is growing. Because many people are new to the platform, I thought it would be helpful to do a comparison between AdWords and adCenter so that people just getting started on this platform would know a little better what to expect.

Rather than write a dissertation, I instead decided to make this at-a-glance chart:

AdWords vs. adCenter

*MSN has said you can have 50 campaigns if there is one ad group per campaign and 2,000 keywords in each ad group. They have said that the grouping limits are mostly set by how your account is structured, just be sure to keep in mind the overall account keyword limits.

AdWords vs. adCenter

*Each negative keyword at this level can contain up to 100 characters. The entire negative keywords list at this level, including commas, can contain up to 1,024 characters.

AdWords vs. adCenter

*MSN counts the body of your ad as one line that is comprised of 70 characters. Your line breaks are always at 35 characters.

AdWords vs. adCenter

*MSN uses a more advanced {Param} function. Check out Jeremy Hull’s awesome guide to adCenter {param} function.

AdWords vs. adCenter

As I built this chart out I realized that I would never be able to do either tool it’s fair justice, so I tried to keep things simple and based solely around what you could find in each tool directly. As there are many shifting parts and changes taking place on the regular, this data here is a snapshot in time.

Additionally, MSN has been vague in the past about some of the numbers present above. If you have personal experience that changes any of these numbers or figures, or if you have additional insight or questions just drop them in the comments below. Hope you find this helpful!

Filed Under: Featured, Paid Search Tagged With: adcenter, adwords, Paid Search, ppc
November 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Google Ad Sitelinks

Last week, Google announced the launch of a new product called Ad Sitelinks, which is not available for all advertisers yet.  This is usually how they release new products, commencing a preliminary run with a select few advertisers before the product is even widely discussed.  Then they start expanding the reach more and more before it is eventually available to all advertisers through their normal AdWords interface.

This new product allows your AdWords paid search ads to include more links that can go deeper into your content, beyond your landing page.  It would look like the example above.

Advertisers may add up to ten links, although Google will only display up to four.  Google thus recommends that advertisers list their most important links first.

To employ this new feature, it is not necessary to write new ads.  Instead, Google will simply add these new Sitelinks to your current ads.  If you are eligible to participate, you will see the option in your Campaign Settings.  Right after the demographic and language targeting, you should see a section called Networks, Devices, and Extensions.  Within this section there are a few options, one of which being to edit your Ad Extensions.  If you do not see this edit option, then this is likely not available to you yet.

Ad Sitelinks Edit Option

This could prove to be very helpful for some advertisers, allowing more options to consumers.  Google recommends taking advantage of this during the holidays as an easy way to update seasonal promotions.

Filed Under: Featured, Paid Search Tagged With: Ads, google, Paid Search, Pay per click, ppc
October 30, 2009 By Leave a Comment

‘Tis the Season for PPC

Are you in the holiday spirit?  Well, if you have a product or service to be promoted this holiday season, you better get in it fast.  Hopefully, you’ve already thought about how you would like to go about your holiday promotions.  It’s important to get an early start on your holiday campaigns.  In fact, according to the Google Retail Blog, consumers are getting an earlier start on holiday shopping this year than ever before; this includes the researching and purchasing phase.  Here’s a chart to show expected holiday purchasing.  As you can see, there are many consumers to catch from now through Thanksgiving weekend.

Google Retail Holiday 2009 Chart

Early planning is essential.  It’s usually recommended to start planning in August or September at the latest, which will give you time for testing, expansion, and any necessary adjustments.  What’s more, your paid search ads and keywords can run for a bit to improve their quality score.  Ultimately, your campaign will be primed and ready to go for current holiday searches.

Some important dates to remember are…

  • November 27th – Black Friday
  • November 30th – Cyber Monday

Even Christmas Day is a big shopping day.  However, I believe that in-store purchasing this day is more substantial than online.

If you haven’t started your holiday campaigns yet, it’s time to get on the ball.

Photo: ‘Tis the Season courtesy of  bensonkua.

Filed Under: Featured, Paid Search Tagged With: holidays, Paid Search, Pay per click, ppc
September 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Paid Search Site Targeting and Exclusion

As mentioned in my last blog post, Microsoft adCenter Placement Reports, MSN commenced transparency, via specialized reports, of where your ads display within the content and search networks; namely, the Publisher Placement Performance report.  Since that post, Yahoo Search Marketing began sharing this same information, as well.  Their report is named the Ad Delivery Report.  Google’s original version, available since June of 2007, is called the Placement Performance Report.

These reports are very helpful when viewing performance of your campaigns.  To take this information to the next level, you’ll want to use it in managing your campaigns.  In these reports, you can view which sites are working well and then target them with higher bids to try for better placement in Google AdWords.  This does not seem to be an option at this point in Yahoo or MSN.  Conversely, in all three of the engines, you can see which sites are more costly with no return (conversions) and you can choose to block them.

In Google, you can adjust bids per site and exclude sites within the campaign or ad group.  In the new AdWords interface, you can view this information under the Networks tab.  You must choose to show the Automatic Placements to view all sites and you can choose any of interest for managed bidding or exclusion.  You can also exclude sites through their Site and Category Exclusion tool.

In Yahoo, you may submit sites in their Blocked Domain tool.  This can be found in the General Account Information under the Administration tab.  When blocking sites in MSN, you can do so under the Campaign or Ad Group Settings under Website Exclusions.

These are great tools to use when managing your Paid Search accounts.  Hopefully Yahoo and MSN will continue to improve these features to make them more robust.  Google has been working on this longer and has more functionality.  I encourage everyone to take advantage of these reports and use them wisely.

Photo courtesy of lorello.

Filed Under: Featured, Paid Search Tagged With: google, MSN, Paid Search, Pay per click, ppc, Yahoo Search Marketing
August 21, 2009 By 3 Comments

Microsoft adCenter Placement Reports

If you are a fan of Google’s Placement Performance reports, you may be interested in MSN’s version.  While running reports in Microsoft adCenter, I ran into this report that I had not before seen.  They call it the Publisher Placement Performance report.

Microsoft adCenter Publisher Placement Report

This report is very similar to the Placement Performance report that is available in Google AdWords.  This report allows you to see on what sites within their network your ads are showing.  This capability makes the content network advertising more manageable because it allows for more transparency.  This report breaks it down by Search and Content network.  In the content network results, I see my ads were showing on sites such as moneycentral.msn.com and online.wsj.com.  Under the search results, there are sites such as bing.com and ivillage.com listed.  iVillage.com is listed because they use MSN listings as part of their search feature.  There are many different sites listed under each network type.

While running this report in one of our accounts, it allowed me to go back to May 13, 2009 to retrieve data for this report.  It was unable to gather any data before this time.

I highly recommend using this report to your advantage to see where your ads are showing, because this is a crucial component to the overall success of your campaign.  It offers an understanding as to which sites perform well and which ones fail to bring any conversions.

In my next post, I’ll discuss what to do with this information once you start running these reports.

Photo courtesy of isriya.

Filed Under: Featured, Paid Search Tagged With: bing, MSN, Paid Search, ppc
July 24, 2009 By 2 Comments

Paid Search Geo-Targeting Hierarchy

Location, location, location was once the mantra of successful businesses in regards to brick-and-mortar organizations.  With so many businesses online these days, it would be expected that location may no longer frustrate success; if your business is online, it’s everywhere.  Oh, but not so fast; location very much matters online, and that’s where Google’s geo-targeting solutions come into play.

There are many different ways in Google in which you may geo-target locations.  You can target by country, state, city, zip code, or custom location by dragging points on the map.  You may also target by DMA (Designated Market Area), which is defined by Google as

“Media markets in which people can receive the same or similar television and radio station offerings, as well as offerings of other media types, such as newspapers. DMAs are defined by Nielsen Media Research, and are used to identify specific media markets for those interested in buying and selling television, advertising and programming.”

What if your business could benefit from displaying different messages to someone searching at the state level as opposed to the zip code level, but you want to speak to both audiences?  There are ways to reach to everyone with a different message.  First, you must understand the hierarchy of the geo-targeting capabilities.

Let’s say there are three campaigns set up with the same keywords but different geo-targeting.  One campaign targets at the state level, one at the DMA level, and one at the zip code level; the targeted areas are Ohio, Cleveland-Akron (Canton), and 44304 (our zip code at the office), respectively.

If someone in Columbus, Ohio searches for a keyword that is common in all three campaigns, they will be served an ad from the campaign that is targeting Ohio at the state level.  If someone in Cleveland searches for this same term, they would be eligible for both the state level and DMA level campaign ads.  They would end up being shown the ads from the DMA targeted campaign.  The most specific targeting will take over.  Lastly, if I were to search for this same term while here at the office, I would see the ads targeted to 44304.

This could be an important tactic for some businesses, such as banks and real estate agencies, where audience locations may be specific.  For example, the state level might show them the state headquarters, the DMA might show them the regional headquarters, and the zip code targeting would allow them to see the local branch.

Photo courtesy of davidrossharris.

Filed Under: Featured, Paid Search Tagged With: geo-targeting, google, Paid Search, ppc
June 26, 2009 By 3 Comments

Google Search Query Report

If you are using broad-matched keywords in Google, I hope that you have taken advantage of the Search Query Reporting that is available through Google, also.  This report is also useful when using phrase-matching.  When you use broad-matching, you are allowing Google to show your ads whenever a similar keyword is searched or something that they deem relevant to your keyword.  Especially with their expanded broad-matching, many times your ad may be showing for keywords that you do not find to be relevant at all.  This can be a costly mistake but may be combated through negative keyword matching with the help of the Search Query Report.

The Search Query Report shows you what people typed in Google to make your ad appear.  This includes these expanded broad searches.  This is helpful to review and pull out keywords that would bring you unqualified traffic.  You can then add these keywords as negative keywords to prevent it from happening again.  This is an ongoing process that will help refine your account.

Let’s say, for example, you are bidding on the keyword “tennis shoes.”  In your Search Query Report, you may find that people are searching for “kids tennis shoes” and you only sell adult sizes.  You should add “kids” as a negative keyword to prevent spending money on customers that won’t find what they are looking for.   You may also end up with keywords in the report like “tennis rackets” which may not pertain to your business.  In this case, you should add “rackets” as a negative keyword.

Along with picking out the possible negative keywords, you should also review for new keywords on which to bid.  There may be some keywords that you hadn’t thought of that you should capitalize on, perhaps long tail phrases or common misspellings.  This is where broad-matching comes in handy.

For example, if there are people that are clicking on your ads and converting off of the key phrase “buy new tennis shoes,” you should consider adding this key phrase to the account.  This will allow you to appear more often when people search this rather than just hoping that the broad-matched key phrase “tennis shoes” will catch it.  It also may end up being a cheaper cost per click as it is a longer phrase.

For anyone who has run the Search Query Report lately, you might have noticed some recent changes.  They are now showing more query results rather than lumping many together under “Other Unique Queries.”  They also started noting “Session-Based” by some broad-matched queries.  This lets you know that that query was evaluated alongside previous queries from that person to decide to show your ad.

Photo courtesy of dullhunk.

Filed Under: Featured, Paid Search Tagged With: google, Paid Search, ppc
May 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Google Trademark Update

I wanted to add an update to a past blog post I wrote, Trademark Infringement in PPC.  Last week, Google updated their trademark policy in the US.  More ads will be allowed to use trademarks in their ad text with these new criteria.

This change will be mostly helpful to AdWords advertisers that are resellers or informational sites.  You can now use a trademark in your ad text if you are using the term in a descriptive way, reselling the trademarked product, selling components for the trademarked product, or providing non-competitive information on the trademark.  Your landing page will have to back this up, too.

If you are advertising your site on Google AdWords for any of these reasons, and have run into problems with declined ads in the past because of trademark policies, you should edit your ads now.  You can resubmit these ads with the trademark terms and they could start running as soon as June 15.  This is only the US, but pertains to both the Search and Content networks.

This is a big change for Google, as this has been a problem that many advertisers have run into the past.  Fortunately, I think this should allow for the proper sites to use trademarked terms appropriately, without their use being abused.

Photo courtesy of gurms.

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Paid Search, Social Media Tagged With: Ads, Google AdWords, Paid Search, Pay per click, ppc
May 7, 2009 By 4 Comments

Top 5 Non-Traditional Ways to Advertise Online

I’m always looking at new advertising avenues to present to my clients. Traditional paid search and search engine optimization can only get you so far in the competitive web spaces. If you are in an industry that is brutally competitive online, you may want to start looking at new advertising methods to keep growing your business.

Here are my top 5 non-traditional avenues for online advertising:

  • Google Local Business Ads – For some strange reason, not everyone using Google AdWords is taking advantage of these ads! Once you confirm your business’s location (or locations) with the Google Local Business Center, you have access to listings specifically designed for Google Maps. From what I’ve seen these are dirt cheap ads. They work great for hotels and restaurants and are perfect for customer service purposes.
  • Mobile Ads – The mobile space is growing quickly. With a push from retailers on 3G phones, people all over are constantly connected to the web in new ways. Our pals over at Google make it easy to target cell phone internet users. In your campaign settings, you have the option to target iPhone and Android phone users where you select if you want to be in the content network or not. They also offer you the ability to create mobile ads. These ads can send people to a mobile site or you have the ad viewer click to call you. For as little as 5 cents you could get a qualified phone call. Also companies like AdMob allow you to buy advertising within iPhone apps. For brand advertisers, this is a great solution.
  • Pay-Per-Call – For many of our clients, phone calls are incredibly valuable. AT&T has a program that allows you to only pay for ads when someone calls you. Their Pay-Per-Call ads get you placed on many online and mobile sites like AOL and Yellowpages.com. Unlike other forms of paid search, you don’t bid on phrases; you bid on categories. While this is bit different from what most people are used to, it works quite easily. Pair this with a call tracking solution and you would know exactly how well this works for your business.
  • YouTube InVideo Ads – YouTube is the big player in streaming video. As you have been watching videos about unicorns or checking out Japanese game shows, you may have noticed there is a new block of ads being served up to you… in your video. The InVideo ads are popping up in the lower 20% of YouTube videos. This new way of reaching an audience is easy to set up. In your Google AdWords account, create a new campaign and adgroup. In your new adgroup use the placement tool and type in YouTube.com look around for the InVideo placement options. Add the different categories you desire to your adgroup and you are good to go! (I would recommend adding in keywords to this adgroup too. This will increase the relevancy of your ads.)
  • LinkedIn Ads – LinkedIn is a giant social network geared towards business networking. If you don’t have a profile over yet, bookmark this article and go set up an account. LinkedIn’s DirectAds is their internal pay per click program. While you cannot target keywords on this platform, you can target very specific qualities you would like the person who sees your ad to have. For instance, you could target people who work in IT at construction companies that have between 51 and 200 employees. How about male legal professionals in the medical industry? Or 18 to 25 year olds in Canada who work for non-profits? The list goes on and on. You won’t see giant volumes of traffic from LinkedIn, but you will see highly targeted traffic.

Chances are all 5 of these methods will not work perfectly for you, but they are all worth a try. You never know when an unsuspecting source of traffic will be the next big thing.

Image courtesy of MIAD Communication Design.

Filed Under: Featured, Paid Search Tagged With: linkedin, Mobile, Paid Search, pay per call, ppc
April 17, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Google Team Advice

Our Google Team, from the Boston office, came for a visit today.  It is always nice to put faces to those voices that you hear every week.  It is also invigorating to have them throwing ideas our way and really being able to brainstorm for clients and an overall strategy.  Plus, they came bearing gifts!  We were each given a Google apron and a Google cookbook.  I’ll have to test out some of these recipes and let you know how they are.

The main thing they were interested in discussing was the Google Content Network.  This is their big selling point currently.  It has evolved into a more dynamic system and they are constantly learning how to master it.  The way they recommend structuring campaigns and ad groups have changed over the last year, now lauding the advantages of separating the Content and Search network campaigns; doing so helps to better monitor and manage the two networks individually, as they are two very different animals.

You may have different budgets in mind for these strategies, and the bidding is easier to manage this way.  In Search, Google recommend using up to 50 keywords in an ad group.  In Content, however, they once recommended throwing upwards of 40 keywords into a Content campaign ad group, but things have changed as they become more knowledgeable and perform more tests.  They now recommend using only 5-10 keywords.  These keywords are going to be broader than keywords you would be willing to use within the Search network since Content terms define campaign themes and subjects where the audience may be browsing.

The ads you want to use for Content may be very different than those used for Search also, because you are potentially reaching an audience at a different time in the buying cycle.  You may want to show a different message to this audience.  If you are using display ads, it is also helpful to create a separate campaign once again for these.  The bids are often times more expensive than those for text ads in the Content network.  This is because of the placement that you should be aiming for with display ads.

In the end, we learned of some new ideas and new ventures, but the main point remained the same: Content is going places and we need to keep up.

Filed Under: Featured, Paid Search, SageRock Tagged With: content network, google, Paid Search, Pay per click, ppc, SageRock
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