• Spend USD250-499 to get USD50 credits of free clicks
• Spend USD500-749 to get USD100 credits of free clicks
• Spend USD750 to get USD200 credits of free clicks

Bing Adcenter advertisers will have to meet the conditions below to qualify for the free credits:

• Receive and respond to Bing Adcenter’s invitation email about the offer on free credits.
• Submit your new campaign (with broadly different keywords and ads compared to your existing campaigns) using Microsoft’s online form through Bing Adcenter’s support team, between November 3, 2010 and November 24, 2010.
• Have a valid US / Canada billing address.
• Meet the minimum required spending.

When submitting your new Adcenter campaigns, ensure:

• All your keyword bids are set to USD0.05 or above.
• Ad groups names are within 60 characters.
• Campaign names are within 100 characters.

Bing Adcenter will email free clicks coupon details to advertisers who have qualified for the minimum spending after December 17, 2010. All free Clicks coupons are valid until January 31, 2011.

Bing Adcenter Tutorials

Review Bing Adcenter optimization and conversion tracking before creating new Adcenter campaigns and spending:

• Official Microsoft Advertising community
• Bing Adcenter PPC optimization, Yahoo PPC to Adcenter Tips
• Track Bing Adcenter PPC keyword conversions in Google Analytics
• Bing keyword tools
• Adcenter Conversion Tracking
• Bing-Yahoo search alliance update
• Microsoft Adcenter Desktop

The transition of Yahoo Search ad serving to Microsoft Advertising adCenter is now complete. Thanks for everything you’ve done to prepare for this transition. Your Microsoft Advertising adCenter ads can now reach 163 million unique searchers using Microsoft and Yahoo sites (including Yahoo Search, Bing, and partners), providing a sizable volume of 5.7 billion monthly searches.

Your ads are now reaching potential customers on Yahoo Search and Bing. As more and more Yahoo advertisers join the auction, it’s important to actively monitor your campaign performance. Take an active role in monitoring and modifying your campaigns to achieve optimal performance results on Yahoo Search and Bing.

Tips for Bing-Yahoo PPC’s Transition and Adcenter Optimization

Some PPC experts offer optimization tips for the transition from Yahoo Search Marketing to Bing Adcenter.

Goodbye, Yahoo: 4 Things I’ll Miss About Panama: Search Engine Watch explains you could use 4 features to optimize on Yahoo PPC, but not on Bing Adcenter PPC:

• Partner domain transparency and exclusion
• Alt text in ad text
• The ability to upload changes via Yahoo Search Marketing’s user interface
• The 71 character limit for ads

3 adCenter Optimization Tips: Search Engine Watch describes how you could use 3 features to optimize on Adcenter PPC, but not on Yahoo PPC:

• Your Yahoo keyword list will have gaps when ported to Adcenter. Use Bing keyword tools to improve your lists.
• Take advantage of Adcenter’s {Param} function. For example, use Adcenter dynamic keyword insertion.
• Take advantage of the new domain exclusion feature.

Yahoo To Microsoft Transition Survival Guide: PPC Hero compares the different features in Yahoo Search Marketing and Bing Adcenter:

• Ad distribution settings – AdCenter lets you to set ad distribution at the ad group level.
• Search Network – Adcenter allows search ads to display through one of the 3 options: (1) All Bing and Yahoo search networks and syndicated search partners (default), (2) only Bing and Yahoo search syndicated partners, or (3) only Bing and Yahoo sites in the US and Canada.
• Language and market settings – Adcenter provides 3 different language settings for US and Canada at the ad group level: (1) United States, (2) English-speaking Canada, and (3) French-speaking Canada.
• Targeting features – Adcenter enables you to target by age and gender, day of week and time of day, device, and location. Incremental CPC bids in 10 point intervals from 0% to 100% above the base bid can be added to your targeting, when a visitor meets your targeting criteria and clicks on your ad.
• Website exclusion – Adcenter lets you block up to 500 sites for search ads and content ads at the campaign and ad group levels.
• Username and password – You can manage multiple Bing Adcenter accounts through one username and password.
• Conversion tracking – Enable Adcenter conversion tracking and you will have access to Bing Adcenter’s conversion report, goal report, traffic sources report, segment (geographic/demographic) report, and tactics and channels report.

Measure with Adcenter Conversion Tracking Tool

Measure your Bing PPC’s marketing spend through Adcenter conversion tracking tool, which can identify:

• The ad copy that works best to achieve your campaign goals.
• The keywords that acquire most new customers to your website.

Set Up Adcenter Conversion Tracking

Turn on Adcenter conversion tracking feature. Pick up the conversion tracking code snippet (http://, if you are to track conversions on a non-secure page; https://, if you are to track conversions on a secure page).

Select one of the Adcenter conversion tracking options:

• Count one conversion per click: This conversion tracking option prevents double counting of your website’s conversions, but may under-count.
• Count one conversion per unique URL: This conversion tracking option requires more than inserting Adcenter’s conversion tracking code snippet onto your purchase confirmation page / thank you page and allows you to track each conversion through a unique URL.
• Count all conversions: This conversion tracking option may include duplicate conversions when visitors refresh your site’s purchase confirmation / thank you page.

Define your “conversion confirmation page”. Your conversion confirmation page (or thank you page) will be:

• The lead confirmation page, if your website offers a form for visitors to fill in information.
• The purchase confirmation page, if your website sells products to visitors with a payment mechanism.

Insert Adcenter’s conversion tracking code snippet onto your site’s conversion confirmation page.

Review Adcenter Conversion Reports

Turn on conversion tracking in the “Reports tab” in Adcenter’s user interface, and view conversions and conversion rates (conversions / click) through Adcenter reports:

• Account performance report
• Campaign performance report
• Ad group performance report
• Keyword performance report

To optimize your Bing PPC’s marketing budget, identify the keywords that convert the most and performance the best (i.e. cost-per-acquisition) through keyword performance report, and raise or reduce keyword bids accordingly.

Disable Adcenter Conversion Tracking

Adcenter conversion tracking is enabled or disabled per campaign. If you no longer need Adcenter conversion tracking for a campaign, turn off Adcenter conversion tracking for only that campaign in “campaign settings”.

If you want to stop conversion tracking for your entire Adcenter account, remove the conversion tracking code snippet from all your conversion confirmation pages, and turn off Adcenter conversion tracking for for each campaign in “campaign settings”.

Conversion Discrepancies to Google Analytics

If you are using both Google Analytics PPC conversion tracking and Adcenter conversion tracking tool simultaneously, the number of conversions in Adcenter reports may not match those in Google Analytics reports.

• If someone clicks your ad on Bing but your site is unavailable, AdCenter reports the click but Google Analytics does not record the visit.
• Adcenter counts the click when someone clicks your ad on Bing and then stops his/her Internet browser before your web page’s Google Analytics tracking code snippet is loaded.
• Google Analytics does not recognize the visit from Bing PPC ad as a keyword’s URL tagging is missing, but Adcenter counts the click.
• Adcenter automatically filters invalid clicks (due to click fraud), but Google Analytics reports all visits to your site.

Review Google Analytics metrics.

Best Practices to Adcenter Conversion Tracking

Microsoft Adcenter’s learning center offers:

• The best practices for using Adcenter conversion tracking.
• The How-to-guide (.pdf) for setting up different Adcenter conversion tracking options.

Bing Organic Search Algorithm, Bing Paid Search Algorithm

The Bing search algorithm that Microsoft manages will power both Yahoo and Bing after the search platform merge.

Microsoft will manage the technology platforms that deliver the algorithmic (powered by Bing) and paid (powered by adCenter) search results.

In paid search, Bing/Yahoo search advertisers will manage only one platform, Microsoft Adcenter, where Yahoo Search Marketing will be shut down.

Yahoo and Microsoft will each provide customer support to different advertiser segments: Yahoo’s sales team will exclusively support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers and their clients. Microsoft will support self-service advertisers. In addition, Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns.

Microsoft AdExcellence

Bing Adcenter provides a learning center program, Microsoft AdExcellence, and Microsoft Adcenter Desktop tool for paid search advertisers.

Yahoo’s US, Canada, International Advertisers

The Bing-Yahoo merge is expected to complete in late 2010 or early 2011 for advertisers in the US and Canada. Yahoo will complete all global advertisers’ transitions by 2012.

US Search Market Share

The Bing-Yahoo search alliance increases Bing’s and Yahoo’s US search market share to 31.6% (Bing 12.7% + Yahoo 18.9%) which becomes closer to Google’s 62.6%, according to ComScore’s US search market share report of June 2010.

Yahoo to Exit Search

In 2008, Yahoo showed signs of quitting search by closing the Yahoo Search Ambassador program.

Yahoo tried to sign a search deal with Google, but subsequently failed.

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?