Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

Most businesses begin advertising online with Google AdWords because it provides a straightforward way to use  pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to attract more potential customers to their website. According to a new report by ZenithOptimedia, 44% of global online advertisers choose to advertise on Google as opposed to only 4% on MSN and  8.3% on Yahoo!  However, I have a feeling that this dynamic might be changing in the not-so-distant future.

On December 4, 2011, Microsoft hit the tech community with an exciting announcement that Xbox Live will now support voice searches on the MSN/Yahoo search engine www.Bing.com.  Consumers who own an Xbox 360 have recently seen a software update for their gaming console.  Additionally, those who also enjoy the Microsoft Kinect accessory will now be able to take advantage of the Kinect voice recognition capabilities to perform spoken searches on Bing through their Xbox 360 console.  According to Microsoft, this new feature is the next step in the evolution of television and entertainment.  They are hoping to be the frontrunners of this new era of entertainment by bringing games, movies, television shows, music, sports and the internet together in one place.

So what does this mean for the 87.7% of global online advertisers who are NOT advertising on Bing?  It means that they might want to think about allocating some of their PPC budget to Bing.  Migrating Google AdWords accounts to the MSN/Yahoo! platform can be a tricky task because the platforms tend to not play nicely together.  There are many nuances that make straight Google to Bing migration difficult for people who don’t do it regularly.  So, if this is something you are interested in doing with your AdWords campaigns, please consult a professional before you attempt it yourself.

It will be interesting to see how this Bing voice search functionality will evolve.  I am excited to see whether Bing will allow advertisers to build voice search PPC campaigns or whether voice search data can be analyzed separate for traditional type and click data.  There are so many possibilities and so much potential for this new functionality.  I can’t wait to see what the future brings.  Only time will tell – so stay tuned!

Yahoo and MSN are in the midst of their big merge, and from a PPC standpoint, it’s really quite business as usual. Until you get the billing end of it and then it’s a nightmare.

MSN is supplying the results of the search, but Yahoo is handling all the billing. What that means is that all charges will come from Yahoo on your credit card statement, not from MSN. On its own, that’s confusing enough – I’ve had quite a few confused emails from my clients who wonder, if Yahoo is “going away” why are they still getting charges from them? But the nightmare end of it is what’s happening on those client’s credit cards – multiple, crazy billing charges.

Yahoo billed on a prepay plan (money in an account which click charges were taken from, like a checking account). MSN billed on a post-pay plan (accrue the charges, then MSN would charge you for them later, like Google AdWords). And that’s where the craziness is coming in – Yahoo is switching all these clients from post to prepay, and charging clients to build up their account so they have money to withdraw from.

One client I have was billed $1 on 10/1 and $25 on the 3rd, 7th, 11th, 14th and 17th. And I’m sure they’ll be hit again on the 21st.

A bigger mess is what happened to the client I heard from yesterday. They were billed $500, $400 and 13 times for $25 on 10/18. And yesterday they were billed another $600. That’s $1825 in two days.

The charges are legitimate, but the large amounts charged so fast are difficult for some to afford. Plus the $25 is such a low number and so many times.

While poking around in MSN, I was able to find a setting on the account details page for the Auto Recharge Amount. Looks like the default setting is $25. You are able to change that to whatever you would like. Why they picked $25, I don’t know. Why they didn’t require the client to select that amount, again, I don’t know.

We’re also having issues with clients where we’re unable to enter a billing credit card. Doesn’t seem to matter what we do, the card just won’t go in. It’s not that the card is declined, it’s just technically able to be entered successfully.

I am hoping that this merger will prove beneficial to my clients, but the confusion and amount of time being spent on fixing crazy issues is definitely beneficial to noone. Thankfully, the customer support is coming from Yahoo, which I’m grateful for. We have a fantastic dedicated Yahoo rep named Lynda who is doing her best in a really crazy situation. We’re talking to her multiple times a day with all these issues, and she’s really going to bat for our clients. I’m sure it will turn out okay, but for now, what a mess.

If you advertise on MSN’s Bing and use the Microsoft adCenter Desktop, you have probably run into errors when attempting to sync your account.  These issues typically come after adding new keywords to a campaign and can be extremely frustrating to work through.  The most common error we have seen here at JumpFly is that there are duplicate keywords in the account.  We search and search but can never find these alleged duplicates.  So, we did some research and found out some useful information about what MSN calls “Normalization.”If you use Microsoft adCenter Desktop to manage your Bing PPC advertising, the following information may be useful:

When working on Microsoft adCenter Desktop, have you ever attempted to “Sync” your account after adding new keywords to a campaign, only to receive an error that there are duplicates in the account?

I receive this error quite often, but in my case, it is not a matter of adding two of the exact same keyword. Often times, it is because I am trying to enter two forms of the same keyword that the Microsoft system has “Normalized”.

Normalization is the process by which Microsoft adCenter removes extraneous characters from user queries. An automatic scan finds and removes duplicate forms from the search query to help minimize redundant content.

For example, let’s say you are trying to add the following keywords in your account:

“jump fly”

jump & fly

jump fly/

jump-fly

jump’s fly

the jump fly

Each form of the keyword ‘jump fly’ above will be normalized to be read by the system as ‘jump fly’.

After attempting to sync your account with these new keywords, you will get an error message telling you that you are trying to create duplicate keywords, even though visually the keywords are very different.

Don’t get frustrated, here’s the explanation from MSN.  If you are looking for the latest release notes on what changes have been made to the adCenter Desktop tool, you can find that here.

As always, if you need assistance with Bing PPC Campaign Management, contact a qualified professional at JumpFly.