adCenter Incremental pricing

INCREMENTAL PRICING

The Microsoft adCenter incremental pricing functionality allows you to set a different bid price according to who the searcher is. You start "base bid" which should be the lowest amount you are prepared to bid, you can then increase that bid by a certain % depending upon the searchers age or gender or according to the time of day.

HOW DO I USE THIS IN MY BUSINESS?
Incremental pricing is incredibly powerful and will become more so as engines such as MSN Search and Google become more accurate and more comprehensive in their client profiling.


Incremental pricing allows you to: -
• Pay more for clicks that are more likely to convert
• Pay less for clicks that are less likely to convert
• Target a very specific audience


Eg.
Let's you sell games consoles and software and you want to push the NintenDogs game (for the uninitiated a NintenDog for the Nintendo DS platform is a computerized pet dog that you need to look after and care for).


So at a guess your target market is young girls aged 9 to 16, yes? NO
That may well be the end user but the person who buys the product is the parent of 9-16 year old girls and (surprise, surprise) it's usually the Mum who does the shopping. Now before you start yelling about sexism and stereotyping, there's a way I can justify my conclusion.


Head off to the adCenter labs at http://adlab.microsoft.com/DPUI/DPUI.aspx

This is a great tool from Microsoft that tells you exactly who is searching for what. Enter term Nintendogs and click go…


What you will see is that Microsoft predicts that 37.12% of searchers for this keyword are between the ages of 35 and 49 and 60% are female!

So what we are saying is that clicks from Females between the ages of35 and 49 are much more likely to convert than clicks from 20 year old males, so why not pay a little bit more for those clicks?

AdCenter allows you to do just that.
 

Lets take another example…
A regional car dealer sells a whole range of cars but is having a local promotion on the Mazda MX5 convertible roadster (a Miata for our US based readers).
Now I used to drive an MX5 (great car by the way) but was always told by my more macho friends that it was a bit… erm, well a bit "Girly" .
Let's make an "evidence based" decision about that shall we?
You don’t need to go the AdLabs as you can do this right inside the Microsoft adCenter interface in the keyword section.

In the drop down box of the Keyword Screen choose "Find Similar Keywords"

• Enter MX5 as the keyword and hit the "find keywords" button.
• In the keyword suggestion list click the keyword "Mazda Mx5" itself.
• Wait a second or two and adCenter will render some graphs.
• Choose the "Age and Gender" tab

Low and behold, the largest age group searching for "Mazda MX5" is females aged 26 to 35!!! By the way, I now drive a Jaguar XK8 much manlier I'm sure you'll agree.


So how do we use this information?
Our car dealer can now decide to pay say 10p as the base bid and then to boost that bid by 50% if the searcher is a female 50% and by 50% if the searcher is in the 26 to 35 age group. Note that this is cumulative so in this instance I'm paying 10p as a base bid, I'm boosting by 50% is the searcher is female so my bid is now 15p and 50% for the age group so my bid for a female aged 26-35 is now 20p.


How cool is that?