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.

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

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

The reality is, Microsoft really could benefit from Yahoo!’s 500 million+ worldwide users. That is a lot of users. Microsoft knows they need to do something drastic to compete with Google’s enormous, and constantly growing search query dominance. According to ComScore, Google again increased its leadership position in April, capturing 62% of all U.S. search queries – roughly 6.5 billion searches. 20% were performed at Yahoo! and 9% at Microsoft Sites.

Last week, Microsoft launched an initiative to reward their searchers with cash back if they buy something online. This may prove successful, but is not likely going to provide the answer Microsoft is looking for. So, has Microsoft really walked away from the Yahoo! deal?

To add to the current mix, in walks billionaire Carl Icahn. This guy has an impressive track record, and just picked up 50 million shares of Yahoo! He intends to wage a proxy battle to fire the current Yahoo! board and get the Microsoft deal completed.

Yahoo! argues that the buyout may not be in their best interest and that they are considering a partnership to run Google’s PPC ads alongside Yahoo! content. Testing has been completed and both parties are excited. Yahoo! can potentially earn far larger income from Google’s ads and save a small fortune on running their own PPC platform. Hmmm.

So how will this all play out? Time will tell, and likely soon. I am thinking Microsoft ends up buying Yahoo!. It would certainly be nice to see Yahoo’s new and improved platform replace the current Microsoft adCenter platform. Microsoft no doubt spent substantial time and effort in determining that they wanted to buy Yahoo!. I suspect that will still be the end result. Plus, it does not seem wise to bet against Carl Icahn. One thing is for sure; change is on the way.

The bottom line here is that Microsoft plans to pay visitors who search and then buy products through Microsoft’s Live Search engine. More specifically, we are talking about Microsoft’s comparison-shopping engine appropriately known as MSN Shopping.

According to Microsoft, “The program rewards consumers with a cash back rebate for a purchase, and gives advertisers the opportunity to sell on a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) basis.”

This isn’t the first time that Microsoft has offered a “Cash for Search” incentive to consumers. For several months in 2006 the company offered almost $1 million in prizes for keyword searches, as well as a rewards program last summer. During both of these periods Microsoft’s search market share increased.

Ironically similar to Google Product Search, Microsoft Shopping also allows advertisers to upload their product database in an XML feed. Inclusion is completely free, and there are no charges for uploading your items or charges for the traffic you receive. However, if you join the BETA testing of “Live Search cashback” then you will most certainly pay a Cost-Per-Action every time somebody buys your product.

So, you may be asking yourself, “Why would I want to pay for traffic that I can get for free?”

Funny, this is the same question that I heard back when PPC Advertising came in to play.
Still, it is a good question.

The answer is competition. If your competition is offering the same exact product, however it comes with a nice cash back incentive, guess who’s going to get the sale.

According to Microsoft, some big ecommerce players have already opted into the BETA program including eBay, Sears, and Barnes & Noble.

If you would like to qualify to advertise with Live Search cashback advertisers must be:

• Headquartered in the United States
• A retail site with e-commerce capabilities
• Able to fulfill the physical shipment of a product
• Able to create and maintain a product data feed
• Able to implement a standard tracking pixel on your website’s order confirmation page

BETA programs are not right for everybody, and depending on your business model this program may or may not be right for you. JumpFly has dedicated representatives at all of the major search engines including Microsoft and we can help advise you on the requirements and possible pitfalls of these type of programs.