Microsoft AdCenter Desktop is a free desktop application/tool provided by Microsoft/MSN for managing your Bing/AdCenter search campaigns.

Using Microsoft AdCenter Desktop Tool

To use Microsoft Adcenter Desktop Tool, download it from the official Microsoft Adcenter website and start managing your Bing Adcenter campaigns. With Microsoft AdCenter Desktop, you can:

• Manage your AdCenter accounts in bulk (e.g. make changes to thousands of keywords at once), from the campaign level down to the individual ad/keyword level.
• Create/edit campaigns offline and then publish changes later when you are online.
• Get performance alerts through Microsoft AdCenter Desktop. Make changes to your budgets/campaigns/ad groups/ads/keywords according to automatic alerts that notify you about key performance behaviors and status changes.
• Discover new keywords through Microsoft AdCenter Desktop and add the new keywords to your AdCenter account using the keyword research tools.
• Get official Microsoft resources for using AdCenter Desktop via AdCenter Desktop’s Help, AdCenter Desktop’s Forum and Microsoft Advertising’s Learning Center on AdCenter Desktop.
• Receive AdCenter’s new feature updates.

Microsoft AdCenter Desktop Took Review by Other PPC Experts

PPC Hero reviewed the use of Microsoft AdCenter Desktop Tool and believes:

• Your entire AdCenter account will be downloaded when exporting. So when you have an extremely large amount, each download may take a long time.
• AdCenter Desktop provides multiple account views and you can edit multiple rows at once including changes to CPC, status, or match type.
• Your AdCenter Desktop CSV import file can’t be exceed 10,000 rows and the layout is very important.

A click on the ad takes you to the introduction video of Google’s Flight Tracker:

Google Assessing Microsoft Adcenter PPC Ads’ Quality and Bing’s Search Volume

Buying PPC ads on competitor Microsoft Bing search engine allows Google to,

• Monitor Microsoft Bing’s search volume on high traffic keywords (e.g. flights)
• Assess the traffic quality of Bing.com’s sponsor links
• Experiment the possibility of creating an online travel search engine (or a flight price comparison feature)

Google’s Flight Tracker

Regarding to Flight Tracker, Google Web Search can display flight details when you search for flight numbers. For example, a search on “aa 905″ shows you the flight schedule from Miami to Rio de Janeiro with departure time and arrival time:

Google announced the launch of the flight tracker at the end of 2007.

You can also find other useful gadgets at Explore Google Search.

Option 1: One conversion per click

• Adcenter only counts the first conversion to occur after a click. Any subsequent conversions from the same click will be ignored.
• This option can be used to prevent double counting.
• You will most likely see your conversion numbers decrease with this option.

How It Works

• A user clicks on an ad and converts on an advertiser’s site (event 1), and then converted again by revisiting the same page or navigating to another place where the code is housed (event 2).
• They then searched for the ad again from a search page, clicked and converted again (event 3).
• With this scenario the system will only count conversions from events 1 and 3.
• Event 2 will not be counted with this option because it originated from the same click as the first conversion that was counted from event 1.

Option 2: One conversion per unique URL

• Adcenter counts conversion events based on the URL and the query string that has been assigned to that conversion page.
• Use this option if you can embed unique codes into your URLs, and if you want Adcenter to filter based on that unique information.
• This can be a very complicated method to implement.

How It Works

• A user clicked on an ad and then converted on the following URLs:


http://www.wibsite.com/thankyou.aspx?sess=DJPWE#!*ewq&SRC=MSN
http://www.wibsite.com/thankyou.aspx?sess=NTPRS#_$witr&SRC=MSN
http://www.anotherwibsite.com/confirmation.aspx?trans=12345
http://www.wibsite.com/thankyou.aspx?sess=DJPWE#!*ewq&SRC=MSN


• This will result in 3 conversions being reported. All of the transactions listed above will be counted with the exception of number 4 since it is a duplicate of number 1.

Options 3: All conversions

• Adcenter counts all conversion events.
• This option will include duplications. So you can use this option, if you have your own method to count refreshes, or if you want to record the raw number of counts.

How It Works

• A user clicked on an ad and then converted twice and then revisited one of their conversion pages once.
• All three conversion events are reported.

If you are already using Adcenter’s conversion tracking and want to implement one of the counting options, you will have to adjust your Javascript according to this Adcenter blog post.

However, Adcenter’s conversion tracking still does not let you track your revenues. It also does not allow you to measure the different types of conversions, much like Google’s Adwords Conversion Tracking, in which conversion reporting can be broken down into sales count and sales value, leads count and leads value, and so on.

Microsoft Online, L.P. is the contracting entity that publishes your adCenter advertisements on Live Search and the Microsoft network.

On July 1, 2008, Microsoft Online, L.P., will assign all rights and obligations in the Microsoft adCenter Terms and Conditions, and any amendments thereto, between Microsoft Online, L.P., and you, to Microsoft Online, Inc., with its principal business offices located at 6100 Neil Road, Reno NV 89570.

There will be not affect existing Adcenter accounts in terms of payment informations or payment processes.

• You will have your new campaign created from scratch by your dedicated expert.
• You will get assistance by specialist on Adcenter tutorials.
• Your campaign will be analyzed and optimized by your dedicated expert.
• You will get editorial assistance.

I believe Adcenter is competing really hard with both Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing in expanding its advertiser base. From the first glance it seems like without any experience on PPC or Adcenter, anyone with marketing budgets will be able to have a campaign up on MSN. However, it would really depend on how well the Adcenter experts know about the campaigns in your industries.

To help your business get noticed in search results with adManager, follow these simple steps:

• Sign up with Microsoft Office Live
• Create your Web site
• Activate adManager

As a new advertiser, you will be given an ad credit of $50 to spend through AdManager.

As a late starter of the PPC advertising platform (comparing to Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing), Microsoft has been trying to expand its reach with quality search distribution partners. There must be speculations on whether eventually Microsoft’s paid search ads should replace that piece of ad space on Ask Sponsored Listings altogether, which would give Microsoft 5% US search market share increase.

US Search Market Share in May 2007, according to comScore:

• Google: 50.7%
• Yahoo!: 26.4%
• Live / MSN: 10.3%
• Ask: 5.0%
• AOL: 4.6%

US Search Market Share in June 2007, according to comScore:

• Google: 49.5%
• Yahoo!: 25.1%
• Live / MSN: 13.2%
• Ask: 5.0%
• AOL: 4.2%

• Save time importing campaigns. Directly import your campaigns from other search advertising programs.
• Search within your campaigns. Use full text search to easily find ads, keywords, ad groups, campaigns, and accounts. (Note: Orders are now called ad groups)
• Quickly navigate your accounts. Use the improved navigation to quickly navigate to any campaign or ad group in your account.
• Manage keywords faster. Bulk edit keyword settings and delete low-performing keywords.
• One click adCenter downloads. Download your datasets into Excel with one click.
• Save important items in Favorites. Tag your campaign items for follow-up using adCenter Favorites.
• Easily access help content. Hover over the green question mark icons for pop-up help tips.1

Related Information:

• Adcenter Ad Ranking Algorithm Update
• Pros and Cons On MSN Adcenter

• Assessing the content of the ad and landing page in relation to the user’s likely intent.
• Assessing the keywords that an advertiser selects in relation to the advertiser’s landing page content, to confirm that they are substantially relevant to both the landing page and the user’s search query.
• Trying to ensure that there is substantive content on the landing page to fulfill the user’s query.
• Assessing the duplicative nature of content in overall search results. In cases where there may be content that is duplicated within search results (including landing pages) Microsoft reserves the right to limit advertising of the duplicate content when it lessens the user experience.

If you are seeing substantial drop in traffic, you should really re-look at the quality and relevancy of your keywords, ads, and landing pages.

Traffic Quality and Quantity

Pros: MSN is considered by many advertisers as conversion rate is pretty high.

Cons: Adcenter’s traffic volume is still very tiny compared to Google’s which is still dominating the search industry.

Demographic Targeting

Pros: Adcenter offers a unique feature, targeting by demographics. Adwords still does not offer a similar feature.

Cons: There are concerns about how reliable the demographic data is, as it is totally based on Microsoft’s user details via Hotmail. Many user profiles were created long time ago and may not necessarily be accurate.

Platform Enhancement

Pros: Microsoft has always been a technology company who can virtually improve its already well-built paid search management platform to compete with that of Google’s.

Cons: For many years, Microsoft used to develop operating systems and office software that require much computing power. Applying this fundamental approach to online platforms that have to work both securely and quickly, it can be a challenge. For example, Adcenter as a user interface is extremely slow.

Acquiring Competitions

Pros: To increase traffic volume to its paid search advertisers, Microsoft always has the financial buying power to acquire traffic partners in which some can even be big names in the internet space, such as AOL or even its rival Yahoo!.

Cons: Even after buying another Internet big names (AOL or Yahoo!), it will certainly take time to integrate the technologies. There can be incompatibility issues during integrations.

My View on Adcenter

I certainly don’t enjoy the slow speed of the Adcenter interface, but I will praise for what Microsoft has done so far in trying to catch up with Google on pay-per-click. Adcenter does have the potential to become as good as Adwords, providing Microsoft’s strategies are correctly executed.

The geotargeting market was automatically being default to English US, though under options it says my location is Pretoria, Gauteng (South Africa). I am 100% sure that I was browsing from South Africa and was not using any browsing proxy to hide my IP address. I was able to see sponsored search results (or PPC ads) that are only meant to be seen by browsing from within the US.

As far as I know, the above URL string should contain ‘&mkt=en-za’ instead of ‘&mkt=en-za’ when I am browsing from within South Africa.

As I do run PPC campaigns on Adcenter for clients. I can be sure that my clients won’t be very impressed when I promised to deliver US targeted clicks, but ended up delivering both US and non-US targeted clicks.

Another reason for this to happen is that it is intentionally built on Live Search beta version. But if so, isn’t it a big step backwards in replicating the current Yahoo! Search Marketing Platform (Overture) in which it does not have geotargeting capability at all?