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.