Thursday, July 21, 2011

Microsoft adCenter Product Changes

Microsoft adCenter is planning to roll out a series of improvements to its SEM platform. Microsoft is coming with several new options in their adCenter accounts, but following improvements are can significantly improve adCenter’s offerings. I have explained about each one of them in detail below:

  • Impression Share Reporting
  • Handling of Match Types
  • Negative Keyword Management

Impression Share ReportingadCenter will be introducing three new columns: Impression Share, Impression Share Lost to Budget, and Impression Share Lost to Rank. Similar to Google has been offering these columns will be based on adCenter’s delivery of impressions through their auction. With these columns, you will be able to figure out your share of voice on the keywords in your account. In addition, you will be able to identify if your impressions are being limited by your low bidding or if your campaign budgets are restricting traffic.

Handling of Match Types - Match types in adCenter have always been inflexible and challenging to work with. These future enhancements will allow us to do the following:

  • Pause/un-pause keywords match types
  • Add separate URLs to each match type
  • Bid separately for each match type

Negative Keyword Management adCenter’s new feature will give you the ability to add negative keywords to different levels of your account that will work together. In the same scenario, instead of having negatives work independently on different account levels, the campaign negatives will work within the ad group in a cumulative fashion. Currently, if you have campaign-level negatives and you add a negative to one of the ad groups, then that ad group will no longer use its parent campaign level negatives. Basically, negatives work independently at the different account levels.

In addition, adCenter will allow you to have exact negative keywords. Rather than using a broad negative for a specific query that you might be mapped to, you will soon be able to use an exact negative to filter out the precise queries you do not want to show up against.

These new features are really exciting to me and look forward to work on them when they are live. Please share your thoughts about this enhancement from adCenter