MSN AdCenter Desktop Application - Are They Finally Catching Up?

The long-waited MSN Adcenter's desktop application is in Beta and has been getting great reviews from the test users so far. No surprise, it's structured almost exactly like Google's Adwords Editor but honestly I don't care as long as it works better than current UI!!!

I've been a search engine marketer or about 3 years now and MSN's Adcenter has not been 'industry' friendly from Day 1. Google and Yahoo are way ahead of the game in search marketing share with the continuous imprvements the make to their algorithm and ad platforms. It may take a long while for MSN Adcenter to increase their market share but they have certainly made a great effort for the advertisers with the new Desktop Application.

I've just applied on the Beta List to get my hands on this tool and as I mentioned above, people are already giving great feedback on this tool. It gives the ability to make multiple changes to following components and will sure make our job way easier:

• Campaigns
• Adgroups
• Creative
• Keywords
• Negative Keywords

In addition, the AdCenter Desktop App has the keyword, demographic and bid research tools from their Ad Intelligence Excel plug-in. Cool stuff huh??? Here's another screenshot:


As usual, with Microsoft comes the flaws... Majority of user complaints come from download time (campaigns especially) and having to Save every page you are on... Hopefully, MSN listens to us marketers and fix these minor bugs before they roll the app out.

So, what does this mean for the marketers in the short term???
Well, MSN does not have a whole lot of share when it comes to Search Volume - a little over 8% according to SeekingAplha.com in June 08. Once deployed successfully, this tool will increase the keyword inventory of almost all advertisers and therefore increase the existing competition. Advertisers should definitely expect higher CPCs for the months following MSN's Adcenter Desktop Application release.

Google's New Display Ad Builder

Google recently introduced Display Ad Builder in the Adwords template where marketers can now create their own display ads with built-in tools from Google. This feature will save hundreds of dollars for those marketers who can now handle their online display ad marketing in-house.

I really like the current templates in the platform which belong to 2 sets of categorizations. Here are a couple of snapshots from the currently available templates:

A.

• Direct response
• Interactive

B.

• Entertainment and Media
• Financial Services
• Retail
• Travel

These sets of templates can apply to many web marketers whether you want a drive traffic to your site by including a search box within the display ad , invite user for a quiz/poll or my personal favorite - showcasing up to 5 items by interactive selection.



I've included a screenshot from Adwords on the side... For those retailers who have a few set of product or keyword categories, this feature is absolutely golden!!!!



As widely known, search engine marketers get a very low CTR from their content campaigns and on top of that, these clicks are low quality from a conversion rate stand point. These features allow the SEM specialists to write very specific and targeted content to attract high quality traffic.

MBO Conference - Indianapolis

I recently attended the Masters of Online Business conference in Indianapolis and came bakc home with lots interesting ideas from usability to ppc management. It was a 1 day trip form Atlanta and apparently I was the only person out of town. The panel of speakers were great and I wish that I was able attend all of them.

http://www.getyourmbo.com/

Here are some bulletpoints I put together form the sessions I attended:

1.      Why “Set it Forget It” Doesn’t Work: Jim Brown (EverEffect - President)

 

·         Match Type Bucketing: Jim showed how you can significantly lower the cost of your keywords with smaller adgorups by bucketing Match Types and very targeted and Relevant Ads.  This is one heck of an advice  in the extremely competitive ppc environment to cut down their costs

·         Negative Matches: Jim was able to show the efficiencies obtained by simply separating match types and applying negative matches to each adgroup. It all comes down to relevancy of your ads to your keywords which determines the quality score and micro grouping with negative matches comes in place here

·         Creative Testing: Ever Effect advocates continuous testing and I picked up on a simple rule for the 2^nd phase of their cretaive tests. It’s called 80/20 rule which basically says that if you found your successful creative and want to re-test it against another cretaive, don’t risk 50% of your revenue by a split test. You can still keep the ads rotating and duplicate your good performing ad 4 times which will serve your better ad 80% of the time. 

2.   Designing the User Experience – It’s not About You! : Jon Arnold ( Tuitive - President)

This presenation was strictly on UX :

·         Personas : Create fictional characters as potential users of your website/tool    

·         User Modeling: Motivation, Expectations, Perceptions, Abilities, Flow

·         Prototyping (We got plenty on the Whitewalls in the office ) : Fail Fast!, Confirm Behavior 

3.      Landing Page Strategies to Increase Conversion Rates : Jim Cockrum (Web Geek Marketing – Consultant)

This presentation covered effective landing pages for predominantly Lead Gen sites.  

·         Lose the “submit button”

·         Avoid Google Slap: Coming from a Paid Ad, Google will look for content. Since lead gen pages usually have few information, they may get red flagged or get penalized by signifianctly high CPCs. There’s a simple trick to avoid the slap: Use hyperlinks Google will index the page accordingly, seeing that it’s not going to a dead page with no content

·         Keep the site above the fold

·         Follow up immidiatey : Jim gave some interesting stats on followup time vs. latency

·         Split Test

MBO Indianapolis was definitely worth every penny (even though paid by my company). There's a lot of talent out there and conferences like this help search engine marketing folks like me to communicate in person for knowledge share.