I really want Microsoft to be successful in the paid search business. I think it would be wonderful for all of us involved in the search engine marketing game if Google had some viable competition for search engine ads. Unfortunately, Microsoft continues to shoot themselves in the foot.

For example...

We have a new client for whom we are running paid search ads on Microsoft's adCenter platform. But Microsoft insists on billing for paid search in $50 increments. As a result, our client has his credit card revoked by his credit card company because they thought it was suspicious that his card kept getting charged $50 at a time.

This is the SECOND client for whom we have had this same problem! Why does Microsoft insist on billing this way? They are the largest software company in the world...and they can't figure out how to charge someone's credit card for more than $50?

It makes my company look bad when this happens because we have to explain the whole problem to our client, tell them why Microsoft sucks so bad, have them go and get another credit card, etc.

Come on, Microsoft...

You've been promoting the hell out of Bing, spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to boost your search engine business...

Fix your billing!

Labels: Bing, Microsoft, Microsoft adCenter, MSN, paid search, pay per click

Today's Squidoo lens is about keyword research. This lens presents eight effective keyword research strategies, along with various resources, links, videos and more to learn more about this very important topic.

Well, Microsoft is certainly trying to fight back against the market share that Apple is taking from PC machines. Its new ad campaigns are big budget productions starring the likes of Jerry Seinfeld and Mr. Microsoft himself, Bill Gates. The first ad, which centered around Seinfeld and Gates in a shoe store, was a flop, in my opinion. It was fairly humorous, but not at all "hip," which I believe it was meant to be. The worst part of it is that it did not at all address the question of why someone should continue using PCs rather than Macs. It was the advertising equivalent of a box office bomb.

This weekend I saw their next attempt, which is much better. In the new ad, many interesting and cool people (scientists, explorers, athletes, celebrities) look at the camera stating "I'm a PC." This ad is more on target because it directly counters the underlying theme of Mac's very successful campaign that portrays PC users as nerds in suits. It still doesn't really address why you should use Windows, but it shows that many, many successful people use PCs.

I have to wonder about Microsoft's ROI on these ads. Maybe in this situation, ROI doesn't even matter. When a company with all the money in the world is losing market share, maybe the solution is just to spend your way back to the top. That's not the approach we take with our clients, but our clients don't have the kind of funding that Microsoft has.

If you don't have a billion dollars to spend on your marketing campaign and need to actually show a return on your marketing investment, call Work Media today! Even if TV or radio is your game, we can help you save a ton of money on your media costs. And of course, we're the guys to call for your search engine marketing needs. Call us at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, Microsoft, search engine marketing, search marketing, TV advertising

We have been hard at work for weeks now on a couple of projects that are taking way longer than expected to complete...but that's just life, I guess. We are currently finishing up our newest book, tentatively titled something like "Winning the Pay per Click Game: Scientific Strategies for Maximizing Your Paid Search Return on Investment". How's that for a snazzy title? Unlike our previous books, this one will be published, either on our own with the help of a publish-on-demand company, or through an established publisher, depending on circumstances.

We are still working on our Google AdWords management application. That has definitely turned into a complex, difficult project. We are working with off-shore developers, but the development process is taking quite a bit longer than anticipated. We may end up taking over development and finishing it ourselves. But hopefully it won't come to that.

In the world of Internet marketing, the big news this week is Microsoft pulling its offer to purchase Yahoo!. Yahoo! stock has tumbled significantly on the news. Yahoo!'s largest shareholder, Capital Research Global Investors, says he thinks Yahoo!'s board of directors should be embarrassed. We at Work Media are disappointed at the failure of the merger. A combined Yahoo!/Google search network would give Google some real competition, which would be good for advertisers. As it stands, Google's marketshare just continues to grow, strengthening its dominance. No good ever comes from one company owning a market.

We are scheduled to speak at an upcoming search engine marketing conference in Nashville in August. That should be fun. Hopefully we'll have published copies of our book to give away by then.

If you need some help with your company's search engine optimization or pay per click management, please contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, internet marketing, Microsoft, Yahoo

I read over the weekend that Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo!. They are willing to pay a nice premium over where the stock is at right now (having been beaten down by disappointing earnings), so it would represent a nice profit for Yahoo! stockholders. Will the deal go through? Who knows.

As search marketers, we would like to see the deal go through. We have tried to use Microsoft's search network and marketing platform (and continue to try) but Microsoft just doesn't have enough traffic yet, and its ad serving platform sometimes just doesn't seem to work very well. There are some features of Microsoft's ad center control panel that we really like, and some that we don't like.

The same with Yahoo! There are some features of its control panel we like, and some we don't. If the merger does happen, we would hope Microsoft would combine the best features of the two platforms into something really useful. The keyword inventory of the combined companies would also come closer to rivaling Google, and would exceed Google worldwide.

Frankly, we would just rather have to only deal with two major search marketing platforms than three. We like a lot of the things Microsoft has tried to do. Combining Microsoft's technology with Yahoo!'s Web positioning would create something new that could really be a boon to search engine advertisers. It would also set up an even more competitive situation between Google and the combined company, which should result in an increased pace in innovation and a better situation for advertisers. It seems counter-intuitive to think that a decrease in competitors from three to two would result in more competition, but it would. Microsoft just does not have the search engine traffic to be a real threat to Google or Yahoo!. But the new merged Microsoft/Yahoo! would be able to give Google a real run for its money. And that would be good for all of us.

If you could use some help with your pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, Microsoft, Microsoft adCenter, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, Yahoo, Yahoo Search Marketing

Microsoft has released a new tool for use by advertisers on its search engine - adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007. Microsoft describes it as:

"...a keyword research and optimization tool that can help you understand keyword popularity and trends, and gain valuable insight on the demographic and geographic information of actual searches."

Now, we are all the time doing keyword research in various tools, exporting the data, and opening up it up in Excel to do whatever type of sorting and filtering we need to get down to a list of keywords we can use for our purposes. So we were very interested in a tool that would allow us to do keyword research directly from Excel, even if all the data comes Microsoft's own search network.

To download the tool, go here:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertising/adcenter_addin

It is easy to install and it even worked the first time we tried it. One disadvantage is that you have to have Excel 2007, which a lot of people probably don't have yet. Obviously Microsoft would like everyone in the world to upgrade to their latest version of Office, which may be one reason it only works in the 2007 version. But it did not seem to cause any problems with Excel's functionality, so if you have Excel 2007 and have need to do keyword research, you should definitely try it out.

After installing it, it places a new tab on Excel's main menu labeled "Ad Intelligence". Clicking the Ad Intelligence tab reveals a whole new sub-menu of really big, colorful buttons:

Keyword Wizard - generates a keyword list from seed keywords.
Keyword Extraction - generates a keyword list based on the copy in a particular web site.
Keyword Suggestion - suggests keywords based on three possible criteria: advertiser bidding behavior, keywords which contain the original keywords, and by keyword category similarity.
Search Buzz - suggests keywords based on top spikiness or frequency.
Monthly Traffic - provides historical and forecast traffic for selected keywords.
Keyword Categorization - identifies categories for selected keywords.
Geographic - provides location information for keywords.
Demographic - provides demographic information for keywords.
Monetization - provides keyword monetization data, such as CPC, CTR, impressions, etc.
Advanced Algorithm - lets you customize the parameters used to create keyword lists.
Options - lets you set system options for the keyword tool.

To try it out, we typed in three seed keywords in successive cells, clicked the Keyword Wizard button, selected the cells, selected the algorithms to use (campaign association, keywords that contain the seed keywords, or keywords that are similar - we selected all three options to bring back the most keywords), set the maximum results to return and the minimum confidence, and then let it run. It returned a list of keywords directly in our Excel workbook that contained lots of traffic-related data for each one.

The whole problem with Microsoft's search platform is that it just doesn't have enough keyword inventory. We recently gave up on Microsoft for a search campaign we were running because we were actually doing much better generating traffic in second tier search engines like Miva (and of course, Google and Yahoo!). But purely for purposes of generating keyword data to be tried in various search engines, Microsoft's adCenter Add-in for Excel is a very cool tool.

If you need help running paid search ads in Microsoft or any other search platform, please call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, keyword research, keywords, Microsoft, Microsoft adCenter, MSN, MSN Labs, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, web marketing

Like all of the major search engine ad platforms, Microsoft's AdCenter has some nice features as well as some not-so-nice features. One feature we like is its bulk keyword editing feature. For one of our accounts, We imported a data file that contained both broad and exact match keywords. For some reason, the exact match keywords didn't get added. But using the bulk keyword editing feature, it was a simple matter to also set the keywords as exact match. Unlike Google, which requires that the same keyword be added twice in order for it to be in your account as both exact and broad match, with Microsoft, you only add the keyword once, but you can then set it as exact, broad, phrase, or any combination of the three.

For maximum coverage, we recommend you add your keywords as both exact and broad. Keywords set to exact match receive preference over broad match due to increased relevancy.

Microsoft requires a privacy statement or link to a privacy statement page on ad destination URLs that collect visitor contact information. This is a very minor, easy-to-account-for detail, but if you forget it, Microsoft may shut your ads down and it could take 24 hours to get them running again.

One thing we don't like about Microsoft's ad platform is that it takes much longer for your ads to enter rotation. With Microsoft and Yahoo!, your ads can begin being displayed in a matter of hours or less. With Microsoft, it seems to be at least a day. Also, for some reason, it seems that search ads go online much slower than content ads.

Another thing we don't like is that Microsoft places a credit threshold of $50 on new accounts.This means that every time the advertiser spends $50 on ads, Microsoft will send a payment request to its credit card company. So, for example, if you are investing $1,000 per day in MSN ads, Microsoft will be making 20 payment requests to your credit card company on the same day. We have found that some credit card companies are resistant to allowing that many charges from a single vendor. If a payment is declined, it can cause your ads to go offline. Once you're offline, it can take 24 hours to get back online. So we recommend having a conversation with your credit card company so that they know to expect many charges every day from Microsoft.

So above are a few tips to keep in mind when setting up a Microsoft AdCenter account. The Microsoft search network doesn't have nearly the total keyword inventory (search traffic) of Google or Yahoo!, but you may find that you can generate cheaper leads. It's definitely worth your time to give it a try.

If you would like to try out MSN ads for advertising your web site but just don't have the time or patience, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net. We'd love to hear from you.

Labels: internet marketing, Microsoft, Microsoft adCenter, MSN, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, web site marketing

is registering a domain name that incorporates the brand name of an existing company in order to capitalize on traffic that might result from owning the domain, or to sell it back to the company that actually owns the domain name. It used to be a way for a little guy to make a quick buck off a big corporation with bucks to spare. But The practice of "cybersquatting" may be coming to an end, thanks to Microsoft. Cybersquattingthose days may be over.

According to a recent article in FT.com, a British financial web site, Microsoft has begun aggressively suing companies that have registered domain names that infringe on its intellectual property. For example, it settled a lawsuit with a company in the UK called Dyslexic Domains for $46,000, which supposedly represents all of the profit the company had earned by using the domain names.

How does this affect you? Simple. Don't do it! You don't want to mess with a company like Microsoft. They have way more lawyers than you do. If you are in the business of profiting from domain traffic (such as by registering domain names that contain popular keywords), avoid the use of registered trademarks or brand names.

For you own domain name, it is fine to include keywords. In fact, you might want to register a domain with some keywords (www.keyword-keyword-keyword.com), and then also register a domain that represents your company name. Then you can do a permanent redirect from the company name-based domain to the keyword-based domain. This way, you will have a keyword-loaded domain, which can be extremely useful for SEO purposes, and a domain name that sounds better and is better for branding that you can use in other media. But avoid using the brand name of another, or you'll be asking for trouble.

For help registering a domain name for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: domain names, internet marketing, Microsoft