SECOND SIGHTING » Microsoft adCenter

Apostrophes & PPC Ads

Tom — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 14:12:54 +0000

The apostrophe is handled differently by Google, Yahoo! & Microsoft when showing your PPC ads. It’s not something thats really mentioned in any of the help documentation but i’ve had problems with it, so hopefully this quick tip will be of help to some people. Lets say you want to add a keyphrase including a word that should have an apostrophe e.g. the word can’t. Here is how it will be handled by:

Google & Microsoft – you must add the apostrophe to show for searches with an apostrophe, and leave it out to show for searches without one.
Yahoo! – you must add the apostrophe otherwise your ad will not show at all. It will then show for searches with or without an apostrophe.

Don’t Delete Poor Performing Keywords in adCenter

Tom — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 10:20:01 +0000

Keywords with poor performance should have their CPC set very low if you don’t want to spend money on that keyword anymore. When you delete a keyword from adCenter its entire history gets removed – even its cost is deducted from the ad groups total cost. There is nothing at all to tell if a keyword ever existed in an ad group.

Now imagine if you delete poor performing keywords when you have spent Â£20 on them and poor performing ad groups at Â£100. Every time you delete a keyword it will deduct Â£20 from the total expense of that particular ad group.Â The ad group may never show as reaching Â£100 expense! You could be letting really poor ad groups run and run as adCenter makes you think you have not spent that much money on them.

This is very misleading and hopefully its something Microsoft will fix soon.

Microsoft adCenter Negative Keywords

Tom — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 20:39:40 +0000

Negative keywords can now be added at the campaign level in adCenter. There is a 1022 character limit – enough to squeeze in around 200 keywords, so it should be plenty for most people. There is nothing in the documentation about phrase matched negative keywords so I would presume only broad match is supported currently.

5 Annoyances of Microsoft adCenter Bulk Upload

Tom — Sat, 26 May 2007 17:26:39 +0000

OK, this is minor, but after you’ve selected the file to import and clicked import, adCenter doesn’t let you know when its finished uploading the data. You’re just left there wondering whether its worked or not.
Once uploaded, all Ad groups are set to a Draft status, which just means they are not live. You have to then go through each Ad group one by one and set them live. What a great way to negate about 90% of the usefulness of the bulk upload feature.
You thought #2 was bad? To set each Ad group live you can’t just tick a box, oh no. You have to plod through 5 pages for every single Ad group and click continue on each page. You dont actually need to do anything on any of the pages, and you cant even click straight through to the last page.
You can’t directly import keyword reports from Yahoo Search Marketing or Google Adwords.
You can only upload one ad for each Ad group. This is very frustrating if you like to use {keyword} as an ad title. If you do this, then you need to have another ad without a dynamic keyword in the title that shows for long queries (ads with dynamic titles don’t show for queries with lots of characters in them).