Introducing Bing Ads and the Yahoo! Bing Network

By Kye Mou September 10th, 2012

While football fans were celebrating the first games of the 2012 NFL season, Microsoft was making headlines by announcing Bing Ads as the new name for Microsoft Advertising adCenter. The new name and some of their recently released improvements are all part of a concerted effort by Microsoft to improve the paid search experience of managing and optimizing Bing Ads campaigns.

In the spirit of name changing, Microsoft also introduced the Yahoo! Bing Network, which is defined by the combined search marketplaces of Yahoo! Search, Bing, and their partner sites. This announcement shouldn’t be too surprising as most search marketers already refer to the publisher and network as Yahoo! Bing. However, my guess is that consumers will continue to refer to each search engine separately as Bing and Yahoo!

Though Bing Ads simplifies a name that is consistently used inconsistently, I think the adverse effects of this change from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective will likely be felt. In other words, we’ll have to see how this change affects the way we find adCenter…excuse me Bing Ads…related best practices and industry news. Leave a comment or follow us on Twitter (@MarinSoftware) and let us know what you think of these changes.

adCenter Introduces Creative Rotation Setting. Finally.

By Kye Mou August 23rd, 2012

Yesterday, at long last, adCenter announced the release of their ad rotation function. Users can now select between two familiar options: to optimize ad rotation for clicks or to rotate ads more evenly. Unfortunately, since these options are only available at the group level, users will have to edit their groups one by one in order to leverage this new functionality. And because this ad rotation setting is only available through adCenter online and the adCenter API (version 8), users won’t find it in the adCenter Desktop Tool just yet.

So what does this all mean? In the past, new adCenter creative would initially rotate evenly until a significant number of impression and clicks were received. After significance was reached, creative would be shown preferentially based on their achieved click-through-rate (CTR). With the release of this new functionality, search marketers can now test and optimize their creative based on performance based metrics such as conversion rate, conversions per impression, ROI, ROAS or Margin—rather than just CTR.

It’s interesting to note the differences in the rotation settings between adCenter and AdWords:

• adCenter allows their rotation setting to be adjusted at the group level, whereas AdWords only allows adjustment at the campaign level.
• adCenter does not place a time restriction on their rotation setting, whereas AdWords will automatically default to optimize for clicks after 90 days (unless opted out).
• adCenter does not allow users to optimize for conversions.

The second point was explained by adCenter on their blog post, and appeared to call out AdWords for placing a time restriction on advertisers:

“Your ads will continue to serve based upon the settings you choose without any time restrictions because we acknowledge that different keyword/ad copy combinations need different amounts of time to establish a performance history.”

I would be interested to see how evenly adCenter rotates ads, since AdWords is notorious for delivering more impressions on higher CTR creative, even when the “rotate ads more evenly” option is selected.

As a best practice, adCenter recommends that advertisers pay close attention to impressions and average position when introducing new creative. Use these metrics as indicators for new creative that may achieve lower CTRs, which can result in lower ad rank and a decrease in impressions. For additional best practices, download The Search Marketers Guide to Creative Testing and Optimization.

Mind the Gaps, Maintain Parity: An Introduction to Publisher and Match Type Keyword Parity

By Kye Mou April 25th, 2012

In a post late last year, we briefly explored the importance of match type parity—expanding broad match keywords to phrase and exact match—to not only improve keyword efficiency, but lower CPCs. Today, we’ll broaden our discussion to review additional strategies for maintaining keyword parity across match types and publishers. This post will help identify where potential keyword gaps reside and provide the necessary tools for filling them.

What’s Great for Google is Good for Bing

As campaigns mature, keywords evolve from experiments to proven revenue drivers. These proven revenue drivers often perform similarly across publishers. If a newly added Google keyword achieved 100 clicks with a 5% conversion rate at a 200% ROI over the last two weeks, it makes sense to test the same keyword on Bing. Unfortunately, many advertisers fail to maintain keyword parity across publishers, even when the failure to do so can result in missed revenue opportunities.

Identifying where these keyword gaps reside can prove to be a daunting task. To promote engine parity, implement tracking when engaging in keyword expansion. (Third-party solutions, like Marin Software, can help track and report on these changes at scale.) Take detailed notes on where, when and why these keywords were added to the account. These notes are not only essential to analyzing performance, but are critical when copying top performing keywords across publishers. To retroactively assess parity, download a sorted keyword performance report and apply an Excel vlookup to compare publisher keyword sets. Take note of where the gaps are for top performing keywords.

Bring the Whole Family

Copying exact and phrase match keywords to broad match type is a simple strategy for reaching a larger audience and discovering additional keyword opportunities. However, an increase in traffic doesn’t always correspond to an increase in performance. When introducing broad match keywords, be relentless in your efforts to find appropriate negative keywords.

Driving improvements in keyword efficiency often requires the use of phrase and exact match keywords. Expanding broad match keywords to phrase and exact allows for effective segmentation of keyword traffic and performance metrics. A keyword on broad match only captures the traffic for its phrase and exact match counterparts. Consequently, the clicks and conversions are aggregated to a single keyword. With the same keyword on broad, phrase and exact match, clicks and conversions can be segmented based on match type and precise optimization strategies can be implemented for each keyword.

But Remember to Silo

Consider the following dilemma. A keyword running on Google across all three match types has a broad match bid that exceeds the phrase and exact match bids. As a result, the broad match keyword cannibalizes traffic that should otherwise be captured by the phrase or exact match keywords. To effectively expand keywords from broad to phrase to exact match types, and segment performance based on match type, you must implement match type silos.

Match type silos not only promote match type parity but, with appropriate negative keywords, guarantee proper query-to-keyword matching. (For more on match type silos, read our whitepaper on managing negative keywords.)

Be mindful of publisher and match type gaps. Once these keyword gaps have been filled, remember to optimize. Researching negative keywords, setting appropriate keyword bids and generating relevant ad creative are just a few tasks to keep in mind. Implement these strategies and share your results with us.

Cascade Bidding For Bing’s Match Types

By Mickey Nguyen December 7th, 2011

It is widely known that in Bing, the three separate match types are in fact the same entity, forcing advertisers to use the {matchtype} parameter to properly track. What causes confusion is the fact that Bing recommends something called ‘cascade bidding’ which allows users to analyze performance more easily and prevents the wrongful inheriting of bids across match types.

In Bing, match types can inherit the less specific match type bid. It is not uncommon for a user to set a bid for broad match, failing to set an explicit bid for the phrase and exact, thus causing all match types to have the same exact bid. For example, if an advertiser is bidding on the keyword “shoe” with a $1 bid on broad match and a bid isn’t specified for phrase and exact match types, they will both inherit the broad match bid. This results in Bing serving phrase and exact match queries as if they had been bid at $1 as well.

How do we get around this?

Bing recommends setting an implicit bid on all match types. The chart below will provide an example of AdCenter’s recommendation for dealing with this Bing intricacy. You’ll see that in the broad group, the other two match types are set to the group level minimum bid. The phrase will have exact bid set to $0.5 and so on.

Since AdCenter does not allow advertisers to pause just one instance of the keyword in a group, advertisers will need to implement this solution. If all keywords resided in the same ad group, pausing one match type will cause the others to follow suit. Due to this behavior, Bing recommends the above: cascade bidding.

Cascade bidding is particularly useful for advertisers who do not have the luxury of tracking dynamic parameters like {matchtype} mentioned above. Even without tracking the dynamic parameter, advertisers can now report more accurately on keyword performance.