Let’s take a closer look at the deal being offered first. Microsoft’s press release states:

Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) today announced that it has made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion. Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock. The offer represents a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock on Jan. 31, 2008.

    “We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We believe our combination will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders and better choice and innovation to our customers and industry
partners.”

    “Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been
progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our
own.”

Let’s discuss how this all affects affiliate marketers. If this deal goes through it could decrease the competition within the search market, which is generally a bad thing in my mind. This means that the impact of one company’s change in policy could more severely damage affiliate marketers, as Google did with Google Slap #1 and Google Slap #2. No one knows if there will continue to be further slaps from Google.

That said, I would much rather see Microsoft purchasing Yahoo! Inc. than Google. At least there would still be 2 very large players in the search market. Microsoft would be able create a balance to the power of Google. Yahoo’s Publisher Network would enhance Microsoft’s attempts to expand it’s content network and technology.

One question that comes up on the practical side of things is whether Microsoft would attempt to consolidate it’s own search under the Yahoo brand or vice versa. Since Yahoo has a much larger market share than Microsoft, I imagine that would be the case. This makes less work for affiliate marketers who spend a good deal of time modifying campaigns for three separate search engines at present. The downside to this is increased competition within the PPC sphere driving costs up.

It still remains to be seen whether Yahoo! Inc. will take the unsolicited offer made by Microsoft, but they sure did try to make the deal pretty sweet! – a 62% premium on the current stock price will be a hard offer to decline. We will just have to wait and see.

Conversion of Campaigns to Other Formats

This is probably the best feature of Affiliate Radar to date. There has long been a need for a script that would automatically convert a CSV from the Adwords Editor format into YSM and MSN bulk uploading formats. The only problem is that both Yahoo and MSN have known this for a long time, and now they are both offering to convert them for you. Well, they claim to do it for you, but it doesn’t always work.

Yahoo’s conversion script certainly leaves the user wanting. In my experience the Yahoo conversion does not really work without assisting it with a lot of manual edits, thus making it useless. So there is a niche here for Affiliate Radar, which actually does a good job of converting CSV’s from Adwords into YSM and MSN formats.

MSN on the other hand just released this option and I haven’t had the chance to test it yet. It may be just like Yahoo’s or it may actually work.

I have tested this feature in Affiliate Radar and it works nicely. The upload into MSN adCenter went without a hitch, but you still have to set the campaign targeting and activate the ad groups manually, but that is not Affiliate Radar’s fault, it is MSN’s.

Apparently the most recent Adcenter update makes this possible in bulk. Meaning you can select all the new adgroups and activate them all at once, rather than one at a time. That in itself would be a huge improvement in the Adcenter platform, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Reporting

The report functionality inside of Affiliate Radar was quite lacking for anyone running a significant amount of PPC campaigns. I thought someone had finally figured out a great way to track campaigns at the keyword level without requiring a vast installation of scripts on a server. It turns out that is doesn’t do all it claims to do, at least not yet.

The automatic generation of subid tracking for all of the major PPC engines is a great idea. This eliminates the need to generate unique tracking codes for each and every adgroup or for those meticulous people for each and every keyword.

Most affiliate marketers track on the adgroup level and not the keyword level, because it can become unmanageable to track every keyword. I bid on close to a million keywords. How am I supposed to track every single one? This is where Affiliate Radar is supposed to come in, and they largely do.

Once you upload a report from the affiliate network, AR quickly compiles a keyword report showing which keywords are converting and which ones are not. Awesome! I thought to myself until I looked for a place to upload my PPC report from Adwords. There was none. That is where my critique comes in.

It is nearly impossible to track and bid based on data that is generated purely from an affiliate network. The affiliate network data has to be reconciled with PPC network data. This is because there is always a discrepancy between the number of clicks an affiliate network will show in its reports and the number a clicks that are actually paid for.

Sometimes the affiliate network will report more clicks; sometimes they will report less clicks. This depends on which network you are talking about. But there is always a discrepancy, and if I am going to bid on EPC data that is reported it is the PPC network clicks that should be counted. This is for the very simple reason that: THESE ARE THE CLICKS YOU ACTUALLY PAID FOR!

You aren’t going to bid based on clicks that may or may not have actually happened. Most PPC networks filter clicks for fraud, and you usually pay for less clicks than you actually get. But in the game of PPC affiliate marketing it is the paid clicks that you want to account for. These are the clicks that you need an accurate EPC on. Not the clicks reported by the affiliate network.

So until Affiliate Radar adds the ability to reconcile reports from both ends: cost and commission; they will just be a nice way to convert Adwords files into YSM and MSN formats, which I have to admit, is probably worth the $97 per month, at least for the time being.

 

“Quality” is calculated based on conversion rates and other measurements of the ability to deliver more interested and valuable customers to you from particular distribution partner sites. Discounts will be automatically applied to your account.

Apparently click discounts will start taking place today and they will be automatically credited. No changes by the end user are necessary. We will all begin receiving a discount on clicks. Who can complain about that? How significant that discount will be remains to be seen, but I hope some readers will post their experiences in the comments.

Those who extensively use the content network and Yahoo search affiliates will likely see the lion’s share of the discounts. Yahoo is recognizing that their search affiliates and content network do not provide the same level of quality that the standard search results offer.

Everyone who has done any significant search marketing already knows this, but it is interesting that Yahoo would come right out and admit it. I think it is a good move in the direction of greater transparency. Yahoo is continuing to roll out improvements to their Panama platform. Preliminary results are good, but whether or not they will increase market share remains to be seen.

I find myself thankful that Google is not the only game in town. Competition is good for everyone. Now if MSN could just get their search marketing platform in order, we might see some serious innovation.

As we have discussed on this blog, affiliate marketers have been scrambling to regain their Google paid traffic ever since Google implemented it’s infamous quality score algorithm. There is no fighting it. The quality score algorithm is here to stay. Mike is pointing the way search engine marketing is now headed.

Search Engine Marketing is Dead…at least as we have come to know it in the past. The days of bid power have dwindled, and a time of synergy has emerged. Synergy between account structure, keyword bids, ad copy and landing page quality is now the undeniable recipe for search success.  Never before has a thorough understanding of the mechanism or funnel of search been more important. In fact, not being an expert on the various pieces of search will leave you in a constant state of bewilderment: Why can’t I get to the top of the listings for my best converting terms? Why does the chart mapping my ROI show a continued movement toward higher CPC’s and less profitability?

The answer is easy…its called Quality Score Optimization (QSO), and it’s the only way to professionally approach search engine marketing in 2007.

The problem many smaller search engine marketers face is the amount of testing it takes to optimize a paid search campaign with QSO. Paid search is no longer the easy entry point for those who know nothing about SEO. Search engine marketing is going the way of SEO. SEM’s will have to chase after Google’s newest algorithm, which like their natural one, will likely continue to change.

Search engine marketing is an ever changing landscape. At times we get a glimpse over the horizon and see where we are headed. Mike Jones at Pepperjam Search just had one of those moments and shared it with us all.

 The latest version has many new features. These include:

• Site Targeting
• Negative Site targeting
• The ability to edit one account while another uploads
• Selection row counting
• Change the status of all selected rows at one time to either paused, active or deleted.
• Export the account listings to HTML files. This is particularly useful for displaying an account to someone who does not have Adwords Editor installed.
• The ability to paste to multiple selected adgroups at once.

There are just 2 things that are causing me problems with this new upgrade. 

First, Google has lowered the number of campaigns you can have in any one account. The latest version of Adwords Editor is enforcing this, and preventing me from adding any more than 15 campaigns per account. This is a strict limitation that has been causing me some headaches lately. There are workarounds of course, like combining campaigns together.

Second, the multiple account upload has not worked very well and it is giving me errors. The Adwords Editor uses a lot of computational power and my computer can slow significantly when I have a lot going on in the Adwords Editor. It does this more than any other desktop program I run, including notorious resource hogs like Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Large Access databases, etc…

Nevertheless, Google has once again innovated the PPC market immensely with the original release of the Adwords Editor program. Yahoo and MSN will be trying to catch their coattails if they can.

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.