I've been quite surprised at how low key the UK launch of adCenter was. I spoke to an adCenter support chap the day after and he did say it had been "very busy". Still from a press point of view, it does seem to have been a bit of a damp squib!

Even the usually prolific search engine watch forum lacked much in the way of comment.

I guess they could be deliberately playing it down as part of a soft launch strategy!

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?

Had an e-mail from Nigel Leggatt, AdCenter Manager to say that AdCenter UK is now live!!!

The Microsoft AdCenter implementation of "day parting" is fairly basic but useful nonetheless.

What's day parting?
In broadcasting, dayparting is the practice of dividing the day into several parts, during each of which a different type of radio programming or television programming apropos for that time is aired. Programs are most often geared toward a particular demographic, and what the target audience typically engages in at that time.
Source: Wikipedia

If you're operating in a domestic market and your product isn't bookable online, why pay for overnight traffic? A client of mine operates call centre that stays operational until around 10:30 pm. Although the client's site does offer online booking, we found that few if any bookings are made outside of call centre hours. Pausing the traffic during non-operational hours saved this client over £16,000 per month with no visible downturn in revenue!


Take advantage of low cost clicks. Day time is prime time. As Day parting becomes more mainstream we'll see fewer and fewer sites advertising in the evenings. The less people bidding, the lower the cost per click! There may be aspects of your business that don’t need to be pushed during prime time (like e-mail data capture for example). Use the cheap time to push this kind of ad and take advantage of the low cost per click.







To choose which time periods you want to show your ads: -
• click the radio button labelled "Select specific times of the day"
• Highlight the time period you want to add and click the "add" button
• Use CTR & Click to select more than one time period in one action

Creating a new Order

Don’t forget, an order is a set of keywords and ads (The Google equivalent is an Ad Group).

Naming your order

The first thing adCenter needs is a name for your “order” and this time you’ve got up to 60 characters.

Start & end dates

You can also set a start date and end date for this particular order. This is very useful functionality as you can pre-prepare future campaigns to start and end automatically on a set dates. Let’s say you sell greetings, you can use this functionality to set your Christmas campaign to November and on December 20th.

Audience Location

We’re starting to get to the sexy stuff now! Microsoft adCenter has made a big deal out of their psychographic and demographic targeting options and this is where the fun starts.

Your primary choices to display your order to: -

a worldwide audience
to specific countries or regions
to selected cities within those countries or regions.

Selecting one or more countries is super simple, there are some limitations though. You can set multiple countries/regions simply by moving them from the Available box to the selected box


If you choose to select cities within a region then you can only select one country and then choose the regions within that country. You cant for example choose Cardiff & London in the UK AND New York and Boston in the US.
Still, the Microsoft adCenter geographical targeting is still pretty impressive. If you want to get super effective you could create different orders with differing prices depending on the proximity of the advertiser to your sales office. For example, your client is a car dealer in Cardiff. Clicks from searchers based in Cardiff may be worth 25p whereas clicks from users in Bristol may convert to sales but in lower numbers and so are worth only 15p.

Day Of Week

Not able to take orders/calls during the weekend? Only want to take calls in the evening or weekends? Microsoft AdCenter allows you to set which day of the week your ads will be displayed (and at which time but more of that in a moment).


To choose which days of the week you want to show your ads: -

o click the radio button labelled "Select specific days of the week"
o Highlight the day of week you want to add and click the "add" button
o Use CTR & Click to select more than one day in one action

The Verdict

I've had a good few weeks now to really get under the bonnet of Microsoft adCenter so thought it was about time I declared my allegiance (or otherwise)!

I should probably preface this "review" with a little bit of my background so you can make a judgment on whether or not I'm "qualified" to evaluate a PPC system. I guess the main point to get over is that I'm not new to the whole pay per click game having worked with Google AdWords over the past three or four years. I've been running high level, highly optimised AdWords campaigns with annual budgets ranging from £500 to £500,000. I define "Highly Optmised" as campaigns where thousands of keywords are split into narrow bands and where ad copy is constantly split tested with the end goal of getting as high a CTR as possible.

Like most people involved with PPC, I've been chomping at the bit to get my hands on Microsoft adCenter , primarily because it's based on a similar ranking model to AdWords. The reason why that model is so important is that if you take the time to fully understand the system and invest your time in producing high quality campaigns you can achieve much better performance than someone who simply adds keywords and copy. By investing in time I can get a better deal for my clients and that gives me an edge over my competitors.

I must admit that my enthusiasm for Microsoft adCenter was tempered slightly after reading the experiences of early adopters in the US. adCenter was launched in the US around March of this year and the forum feedback was luke warm to say the least.

Let's start with the interface! I'm going to put the technical glitches to one side for this review, this is a beta test after all. Having lived and breathed AdWords for so long I guess it was inevitable that I would be uncomfortable with a new interface in the first few days. The basic structure is the same for both systems but the primary structural differences are the with adCenter you enter global settings (such as audience location, day parting etc) at the order (ad group) level. When your creating a whole batch of ads, it can be a little cumbersome to enter the countries, times, days etc individually for each and every order. Having said that, I guess there are scenarios where this degree of flexibility would be an advantage.

Things I love about adCenter!

Setting up new accounts is a doddle!

As you go through the order creation process, the system "saves" each stage so you can opt out and return later

The keyword research tools are simply fab! There's even an option to allow you to search other sites for their keywords!

The demographic targeting is interesting and has huge potential

The dynamic text insertion options are very powerful when you are entering bulk keywords to test the potential.

Things Microsoft adCenter need to look at!

The billing!

The delay in reporting

Not being able to capitalise letters in the display URL

The turnaround time in processing

 

The "bad stuff" above can be sorted out and what we'll be left with is a system that ranks on quality, provides great research tools and delivers targeted traffic.

As to the the end results, I'm getting outstanding traffic with terrific click though rates (average of 20%) at a really low cost per click. Now I know these performance figures will change when adCenter goes fully public here in the UK but so far I'm impressed!

Yahoo needs to be seriously concerned! In my opinion adCenter stomps all over it in almost every sense. I think the flurry of activity and new functionality we've had from Google in recent months is partially a reaction to the new kid on the block.

For me Google AdWords is still the best system but Microsoft adCenter is giving it a real run for it's money!

Well done Microsoft, for once you seem to have delivered on your promises!

 

Anyone who's read any of my other blogs or articles will know I'm a little peeved (shall we say) by Google's Trademark policy. Perhaps "a little peeved" is an understatement.. perhaps incensed is a better word.


Here's the scenario, if you own the trademark to a word or phrase you can ask Google to disallow companies from bidding against that term or from using that term in their advertising. So Safeway can't bid on Tesco related keywords. Fair enough I hear you say!!!!


The big players in all kinds of industries are abusing this rule to create a search engine results monopoly and its unfair and plain wrong. In my particular industry of expertise (travel) there are tour operators who have traditionally sold their product through a whole network of independent travel agents. A large number of these operators have trademarked their brands and have made sure that these agents cannot bid on those terms. Some of these operators are totally boldfaced about the practice and openly admit they are simply forcing their customers to book direct rather than use their own agents.



Looking at the adCenter policy document it seems that adCenter are making exceptions where…

"The Advertiser's website sells authentic goods or services that are distributed under the trademark."


adCenter, I applaud you!!! This is a breakthrough for common sense and will help break the search engine monopoly caused by the greed of these bigger companies.

Here's the latest from the official AdCenter Blog....


Firefox is Coming! Firefox is Coming!
You asked for it, so here it is. Starting August 6, you’ll be able to use Microsoft adCenter with the Firefox 1.5 browser!


Thank you for your patience while we make this important change.

It's easy to pick holes in any new application and so I'm going to try and be more positive and look at the actual results that I've had since starting adCenter.



Let's take a client in the travel industry which is incredibly competitive.
In the last 7 days adCenter has delivered 20,051 clicks at an average cpc of just 7p with a CTR of 20%.



I'm pretty pleased with that although I'm sure those figures will change when adCenter goes public.

Here's a tricky one that Ad Center have really got to sort out ASAP. In AdCenter you have multiple accounts each with their own payment options. These accounts can represent different departments within your company or if you’re an agency, different clients.
In my case I am beta testing three clients, each with their own credit card details. The credit card for one of these clients reached its limit this morning and AdCenter sent me a very nice e-mail letting me know that the account is past due.


"Your orders have been paused and you cannot create new orders or change existing ones until your payment has been received." Nothing unusual or unreasonable in that.
When I log in to AdCenter to update the credit card details with another card provided by my client, what do I find?


ALL MY ACCOUNTS HAVE BEEN PUT ON HOLD!


So if one of my clients has a credit card issue, it would seem that all of my clients are put on hold until the issue is resolved. As an agency, I can't imagine having to explain to client X that his account has been put on hold because Client Y hasn’t paid his bill!!!!!
Owch!

An adCenter order is like a Google Ad group.


The Structure is as follows: -


An Account is like a Client in the Google MCC
Each account has multiple Campaigns (same as Google)
Each Campaign has multiple “Orders” (ad groups)


All make sense? OK so why do I have to add “Campaign” type settings for each Order (ad Group).


For each ad group I have to ad the start and end date options, country options, Day Parting options, language options for every single order???


For the life of me, I can’t see why these settings are not at Campaign Level. Perhaps someone could enlighten me?