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 Reporting – adCenter 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

Google Mobile Search Traffic in 2011

Although there is a large gap between the number of queries and mobile’s share of search advertising, but more and more search queries are originating from mobile devices. With more and more, smart phones coming to market (which now represent almost 20% of the US handset market) Google will do what all it can do to get more penetration in to the Google search market.

Below is a forecast on US mobile search revenue and mobile internet users. According to this report, US mobile search advertising revenues would grow from $33 million in 2007 to $1.4 billion in 2012 and the number of mobile Internet users would grow from 38 million in 2007 to 92 million in 2012.

Looking at these stats it’s quite evident that there is a huge growth year on year in mobile search market. At present Google doesn’t have a separate bidding interface for mobile, both AdWords for PC and Mobile are in same interface. In terms of display ads, rates for mobile placements were much higher than on the PC in the past but ad rates have come way down over the past year. This is partly because of ad network competition and the fact that consumers are adopting the mobile web faster than advertisers and there are now many more page views than ad inventory to fill them all.

In coming years one thing to watch out would be Mobile Search. Growth in Google’s Mobile traffic has been 5X over the past 2 years. So, if you are already not using mobile search than its right time to be a part of this fast growing market.

Mobile Ad Sitelinks Now Available in Google

Mobile Ad Sitelinks is a new feature that is available globally and appears on high end mobile devices, giving users the option to access multiple landing page options for your website. While functionality is similar to Ad Sitelinks for desktop, currently only two-line sitelinks will appear for searches performed on mobile devices, as outlined in the example below for searches on Oakley sunglasses.

Desktop Ad Sitelinks have been a useful tool for advertisers, leading to an average increase of more than 30% in click-through rates. Because websites may not yet be optimized for viewing on mobile devices, navigating them to find information can be more difficult. The new Ad Sitelinks feature is a great way to drive more qualified clicks to your website, helping to send users further down the conversion funnel by sending them to the page most relevant to their queries.

Implementing Ad Sitelinks is a simple process that can be done from the Ad Extensions tab within your AdWords account:

1. Navigate to your mobile targeted campaign and click on the the Ad Extensions tab.
2. Click View campaign extension information.
3. Select View:Sitelinks extensions from the drop down menu.

4. Click New Extension to add links for the ad group or entire campaign and enter the information in the Links area.

5. To edit them, place the curser over the extension and click the pencil icon that appears.

To learn more about creating Ad Sitelinks, visit the AdWords Help Centre page at: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188236