Having read a great many critical forum articles regarding the Ad Center support team, I had pretty low expectations when I called them today. I spoke to a guy called Keith who was not only very friendly but incredibly helpful!!!

Maybe I was lucky but my first taste of Ad Center support was a good one.

My call was about the reporting delays that have been a problem for a great deal of users both here in the UK and across the pond. The crux of the problem is that there is a delay in reporting so it's difficult to tell how much you have spent on a day-to-day basis. A good tip I picked up today was that if you select your reporting timescale as "hour", the reports are up to date.

I spent an hour or so this evening watching the video of the AdCenter presentation at the 2006 Strategic Account Summit. The video features Steve Balmer talking about the future of Search in the Microsoft World and was at pains to stress Microsofts desire to work with partners and it's commitment to what he called an ecosystem of partners. This is of course at odds with the strategy of both Yahoo and Google to market direct to the purchaser rather than work through agencies. If you dont already know, Ad Agencies used to make a good commission from both these companies up until fairly recently.

Balmer pressed home Microsofts commitment to "search" and spoke of the $1.1 Billion dollar annual R&D budget for AdCenter.

I guess the aim is to court the ad agency industry who feel a little let down by both Google and Yahoo. Balmer and Yousef Medi cited the technology investment as proof of thier support for the industry. Medi showed delegates (made up of members of the advertsising industry) the Ad Center lab site with it's plethora of tools that allow advertisers to gain better insights into the make up of site users.

The big question everyone is asking is will AdCenter ever become as big as Google and Microsoft will certainly have you believe the answer is a definate yes. Time will tell.

If you have an hour to kill, check out the video.

PS UK audiences wont be encouraged either by Balmers complete ignorance of who Robbie Williams was or Joanne Bradfords (MSN VP) insistance on calling a cricket bat a "cricket paddle"

The Microsoft Ad Center Labs site is cool and well worth a visit. It's a showcase for AdCenter related technology and there are loads of new toys there that can help you not only with your Ad Center campaigns but also with your marketing in general.

The Search Funnel tool allows you to enter a keyword and find out what people typically search for before and after that keyword.

Type in the kewyord "vacation" for example and the Search Funnel will tell you that 4,250 users searched for that term and then searched for "Expedia" (4.7% of those initial 4,250) "Travel" (3.06%), Cruise (2.73%), "Vacation package" (2.16%) and "Travelocity" (2.12%). Great Keyword Research tool!


The DemoGraphics Prediction is also very interesting. Enter a search term or even a url and the system will give you demographic data for users of that site or that search term.

The Seasonality Search allows you to type in a keyword and see what teh traffic patterns are for that keyword. Type in Cheap Halloween Costumes and surprise, surprise you'll see that the traffic peaks in October. EVERY YEAR! WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT??

Why oh why is the AdCenter interface not compatible with the FireFox Browser? We're used to sites that behave a little differently in Firefox than they do in IE but AdCenter agressively blocks access to FireFox users!!

Carolyn of the Ad Center community team says "our goal is to support all of our adCenter advertisers".

Not really sure why AdCenter is being launched as Microsoft AdCenter rather than MSN AdCenter as originally planned. A post on SearchEngineWatch had this to say....

The name change is a very curious decision. With all search related products branded under the MSN name, why change MSN adCenter to Microsoft adCenter? When going to the adCenter site now, it has been entirely rebranded Wednesday evening to coincide with the Thursday announcement. It will be interesting to watch others weigh in on this topic. I am not sure that rebranding from MSN to Microsoft is the best decision for adCenter, but it is certainly a decision that will get people talking about the possible reasons why for the rebrand.

Jack at the excellent, Microsoft Ad Center Code Blog (used to be MSN Ad Center Code Blog)is equally unsure (or maybe just plain disinterested in the name change.

At the end of the day it's just a name but it's interesting that Microsoft chose the brand that's maybe more known for offline product than online. Can we expect an AdCenter desktop tool soon I wonder?

As a seasoned Ad Words obsessive, I've been eagerly awaiting the launch of Microsoft's Ad Words rival... Ad Center. Why the anticipation? Ad Center rankings are based on a quality score much like Google. In really simple terms this means that if you're smart and produce great ad copy, great keywords and split test you can get your clicks cheaper than your competitors. Both Yahoo and Miva base thier rankings on a simply "the more you pay the higher you rank" method.

So after having played with Ad Center for an hour or so what are my first impressions?

Ad Center features some very cool functionality that puts even Google in the shade. I guess this is why Google have released so much functionality over the past few months just to try and fend off what they knew was coming in Ad Center.

Dynamic Text
This is VERY cool! Google Ad Words allows you to add whatever keyword the user types into the headline fo your ad using the {keyword} paramater. This saves so much time and helps ensure your ad is relevant. Ad Center takes this idea and improves on it by adding more flexibility and more parameters and you can add them to all lines in your ad copy!

Incremental Bidding
Now you can bid different pricing depending on who sees the ad!!! If you sell a product aimed primarily at women under 30 years old you can choose to pay more (and get higher ranking) only for users in this target group. Men may well buy your product as a gift but the conversion ratio may be less and so you'll likely want to bid a little less for ads shown to men, now you can!

Research
Ad Center's keyword research tool is also pretty nifty. Ad Centers big selling point is that it uses info about it's users gleaned from profiles in MSN etc to allow advertisers to target certain individual user types. The Ad CEnter research tool not only allows you to find keywords but also shows you a history of the amount of traffic that keyword has generated, what the male/female ratio is for users who enter that keyword and thier geographical location!

AS I become more accustomed to these options I'll go through them in depth.

Hi & Welcome to my Blog.
I've just got my invitation to the Microsoft Ad Center Beta trial here in the UK. This blog will be a journal of my journey through Microsoft Ad Center and will hopefully contain useful hints, tips and optimization tricks that I may discover along the way.

Enjoy