Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

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.

Honestly, I don’t understand why every single company or person trying to sell a product or service is not doing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Sure, you can run a newspaper ad and just hope the right person reads it at just the right time when they are looking for your product or service. Sure, you can run a TV campaign and again hope that people who might be interested in your product or service are actually watching TV at just the right time when you run the ad. Sure, you can throw up a billboard on the highway and hope that just the right drivers are seeing your advertisement just when they need your product or service. You can even throw up flashing billboard displays on thousands of websites and hope that just the right customer base is searching the web at just the right time when they are in need of, or desire, your product or service.

Or you can run a PPC campaign with Google AdWords, or Yahoo Search Marketing, or MSN AdCenter, and show your ads to precisely those people who are already looking for your product or service! Obviously, there are other reasons why you wan to run newspaper ads or television campaigns, but PPC advertising really should be a part of your marketing efforts. Yes, there is an expense involved, but that’s true of any type of advertising, and I’m hard-pressed to find any other type of advertising that is more directly focused on the exact type of customer you want for a business. By putting a keyord term or search phrase into a search box, these folks are looking for you so you should be doing whatever you can to help them find you — and that means running an online pay per click campaign.

Of course, at JumpFly we have a vested interest in pay-per-click advertising because our business is to help others manage their ppc campaigns, but we also run our own PPC campaigns because we believe in the value of it and we have seen excellent new partnerships and clients result directly from our own use of pay-per-click marketing. We’re always looking for new customers, too. If you’ve been hesitant or unsure about using pay per click marketing for your business, I encourage you go give it a try. Even if you don’t want or need JumpFly’s services, we have seen such incredible results with other business owners that I encourage you to at least give it a try. Your holiday sales figures might turn out much better than you hoped for if you do.

Learn more about Jack

One of the running jokes around the office here at JumpFly concerns MSN and their PPC platform.  When MSN PPC is mentioned aloud, the inevitable astonished question arises – “MSN has a search engine?”  That always gets a few chuckles.

Yes, MSN does indeed have a search engine.  I’ll be the first to admit that the volume isn’t huge and the management interface for their PPC platform can be quite tedious to work with, but it can deliver some incremental traffic for your business. 

One valuable change they just made in the Microsft Avertising adCenter is that they now allow you to pause keywords or ad copy (learn how here).  Prior to this change, you had to actually delete keywords or ads to stop them from running.  This made it difficult to keep track of which keywords or ads you had tried that were not working as well as you had hoped they would.  Before this change, you had to go in and delete the keyword itself instead of just pausing it.  This would also remove any history that the keyword might have had in the account from the keyword tab screen.

The biggest advantage of all this is just the increased flexibility you now have in how you can manage your keywords and ads in adCenter.  To me, that’s the best part about this.  Sure, you will always be deleting keywords and ads that you don’t want, but it’s nice to have the flexibility to pause keywords or ads that are seasonal or might see the light of day in the future.  You might run a new sale perhaps, or revise a landing page to make it a stronger converter.  Again, it’s just nice to have more flexibility in your PPC advertising strategies than to always have to use the final axe chop.

More about Jack