Google Adwords Site Targeting goes PPC
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Google, Google Adwords, Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off
Last week, it was announced on the Google Adwords blog that site targeting will begin to allow advertisers to bid on a cost per click basis. This is great news for smaller advertisers who have a hard time projecting their ROI on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis.
Adwords Site targeting is a feature that allows content match advertisers to choose which websites they want their ads to appear on. This is especially important to advertisers with a high level of brand consciousness, because they generally want control over where their ads are displayed. Traditional content match does not allow the advertiser to choose where their ads appear in the content match network, but site targeting does.
This is not going to be open to the public at first. They are now accepting interested advertisers to sign up for the Beta phase, which is set to start in about 3 weeks. Check it out and sign up now if you are interested:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/02/test-cpc-site-targeting.html
MSN adCenter’s Quick Launch anything but…
Filed Under Google Adwords, MSN, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo Search Marketing, adCenter | 2 Comments
MSN’s adCenter is the third largest pay per click network available to the search engine marketer. MSN was late to the game, following both Yahoo and Google’s lead. One would think this would give them an advantage, enabling them to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors, but sadly they have not. In my experience MSN’s adCenter interface is the worst one of the three by far. Even Yahoo Search Marketing’s old interface was much better than the UI offered by MSN adCenter.
Inability to Search
MSN adCenter makes it very difficult to find an adgroup by name unless you know which campaign it is in. They offer a search interface, but if you try to search across the whole account, it does not allow you to. The only way to search is within each campaign. To further complicate things, they do not allow you to view all the adgroups in a campaign on one page. You can only view 30 adgroups per page, and when you have a large account like we do, this is very inconvenient. Not surprisingly, Google Adwords has the best search interface by far, allowing you to search by any keyword and generating a list of adgroups and keywords that match your search. All pay per click networks should aspire to do the same.
Bulk Uploads?
This is perhaps the worst bulk uploading interface I have seen. They separate the keyword uploads from the ad copy uploads, and you have to upload at the adgroup level. You cannot simply create a sheet and upload an entire account like you can in both Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Adwords is again the leader in this arena with their Adwords Editor. Adwords Editor is a desktop program that allows you to work locally, make changes, create new adgroups, create new campaigns, adjust bids, and more. When you are done with all your changes you simply upload them to your account and they are live in a matter of minutes. Yahoo has a somewhat more complicated system, but it works, and though I haven’t tested it yet, they now offer an Adwords sheet converter that offers to take your Adwords account and copy it into your Yahoo account. This is a great idea if it actually works.
MSN adCenter has nothing of the sort, though I was told a desktop interface like that of Google’s is in the works. Knowing Microsoft it might be years away. It is badly needed to say the least. To upload anything into MSN adCenter you have to manually create your adgroup in their interface, then navigate to the upload page, upload your keywords, then upload your ads. There are 2 separate sheets for these. I have been asking myself in disbelief for months: there has to be a better way. They must offer some sort of conversion system. That brings me to MSN adCenter’s “Quick Launch”.
Quick Launch?
I called adCenter support to ask for their help in moving my many Adwords and Google accounts into MSN. I thought they would be happy to help, as we would be spending thousands each month as a result of the move. After telling me there is no bulk upload that can be used across the entire account, they told me about their QuickLaunch program. This is a program the MSN offers to new advertisers for the first 30 days to help them setup their account and to move Adwords and Yahoo accounts over to their interface. Perfect! Well that is what I thought at the time. So I got on the list. About a week later I was contacted by someone from the Quick Launch team. She wanted to setup a time to meet when we could go over our needs and get started. We setup a time to meet. The day before the meeting she cancelled because she was sick. Another week passed. Then the following week she attempted to contact me again, but I was in the middle of a week of meetings…Next thing I know the 30 days had passed and I no longer qualified for their Quick Launch because I was no longer a new account holder. In the mean time I had several employees adding adgroups to their system manually.
I contacted them again about 2 weeks ago, and I explained my situation. This time I got a really nice woman who sympathized and promised to reinvoke my status into the Quick Launch program, due to the circumstances of the expiration. She has put in requests to the Quick Launch team 4 times so far with no response. Apparently they are treating her, a Microsoft employee, as poorly as they were treating me. They basically ignore her. She contacts me every few days to let me know she is still working on it, but frankly, I doubt she will ever get me any help. It is quite ironic that the system named “Quick Launch” turns out to be anything but…
Open Discussion of MSN adCenter experiences
I want to open up a discussion of people’s experiences with MSN adCenter, whether it has to do with Quick Launch or just work with it in general. Perhaps I am the only one having these problems, but I doubt it. Please share your experiences in the comments section. Perhaps someone has some tips on how to make it work, or perhaps it is a lost cause.
Yahoo Search Marketing’s Got Service!
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo, Yahoo Search Marketing | Comments Off
I just got off the phone with a Yahoo Search Marketing representative who read my previous post and was willing to help me. We had a long discussion of why the upgrade was not working for us, and how to fix it. Once I explained how we needed things reorganized, she said it would take 5 to 10 days to do the fix. That would have been nice to hear 2 weeks ago when I started working on this with 3 of my employees. As of today, on day 9 of our work sorting out our mixed up account, they will have it fixed tonight. So I declined Yahoo’s offer and just wish it had come 9 days ago when we first called Customer Service about the problems we were having. She talked to her manager and they credited 2 of our accounts for a total of $500. Nice! Yahoo Search Marketing’s Got Service. The rep also gave me her direct line in case of any future problems. The old cliche is still true today: The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Oil.
Yahoo Search Marketing Upgrade a Mess
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo, Yahoo Search Marketing | Comments Off
I am in the middle of the second week of trying to sort out the mess created by Yahoo Search Marketing’s upgrade to their new system. While I think the new system has many advantages which include a hybrid bidding model, 2 levels of organization (campaigns and adgroups), and the ability to move adgroups easily, so far the upgrade has been nothing but headaches for us.
We are paying our database developer to create new imports for the new YSM reporting system, because Yahoo completely changed the report formats that are available. I have talked to other affiliate marketers who are facing the same headache, but having a much harder time than I am. I suppose I was a little more prepared, because I saw this coming. I knew the upgrade would be a huge headache and I got my developers on it as soon as I got a preview of the new accounts.
One of the major benefits that I was looking forward to was a streamlined editorial review, where new keywords and ads would go online right away. That was completely misleading. All new ads, adgroups and keywords still have to go through the same old slow editorial review by humans. The only difference is they show up in the adgroup right away with the status of “pending”. What the hell is that! That is not a streamlined editorial review.
I have yet to see how the numbers on the new bidding model will work out. Once I sort out the huge mess that all my accounts have become, I will report back on this.
That brings me to my next point. Why has Yahoo taken categories and made them into campaigns? Yahoo has taken all our existing categories and turned them into campaigns, even though the campaign limit per account is 20. To make up for this they lumped the rest of our categories into one huge campaign called “Merged Campaigns”. So in order to create adgroups to fill these campaigns they split up currently existing categories into smaller ones and named them whatever they thought they were about. Isn’t it obvious that the old Yahoo Search Marketing “category” was the equivalent of an “adgroup” and not a “campaign”? So I have to clean up this disorganized mess. It has made it completely impossible to track my ROI, because what was once tracked as one category now has been split into 4. I have been working on this with a team of 3 other assistants for 7 business days now. I should be working on new projects that we have in the works, but I am stuck fixing something that wasn’t broken. That’s “progress” for you; well that’s “progress” at Yahoo Search Marketing.
I think they should give everyone a week’s worth of free clicks just for putting us through all this. We have been loyal customers and spend thousands of dollars every week. But we have no choice really do we? Yahoo is the big #2 and without them we would be missing out on a really big market. I used to like YSM a lot, let’s hope I can sort it out and make the new system work for us. More details on the Yahoo Search Marketing upgrade to come.