Microsoft has been testing their new free analytics program for a while and a new round of invites has recently gone out to those wishing to try out analytics.

A few important troubleshooting tips if you have an invite:

• You may have to visit the page a few times before the signup process runs smoothly. It looks like the initial errors where the pages were erroring out have been fixed.
• Ensure the email address of the invite is the exact same as the email address in your adCenter account
• Once you have the code and place it on your site, you have to wait for statistics to accrue before you can add advanced options such as:
  • Goal setting
  • Outbound link tracking
  • Event tracking
• Be patent. While trying to write this post, the system has been unavailable about half of the time I’ve clicked on a link within the analytics interface.

The most interesting feature is the ability to segment your analytics by age, gender, occupation, and geography. This is most likely associating website visits to passport accounts and other Microsoft data which is similar to how adCenter’s targeting works.

While Microsoft doesn’t know everyone’s information, and the ‘unknown’ category is by far the largest, the additional data can be quite useful for slicing and dicing data.

Screenshot of segmentation by Age. (click image for full view)

Screenshot of segmentation by Gender. (click image for full view)

Screenshot of segmentation by Occupation. (click image for full view)

Screenshot of segmentation by Geography. (click image for full view)

While the interface is still a bit basic and erratic, the above segmentation data is not available in any other free analytics service that I’m aware of.

Using Microsoft adCenter Analytics combined with Microsoft adLabs can give you some powerful analytics to help engage your audience in new and meaningful ways.

Microsoft’s adExcellence program is similiar to the Yahoo Ambassador or the Google AdWords Professional program.

The program is still in beta, however, to quality for the program one must pass a test and have a minimum amount of spend (which is pretty low) in an account to quality for the program.

The original test wasn’t extremely difficult, and I’ve already talked to Microsoft about some of the questions and changing them up a bit. Many of the items were around PPC best practices; which is good to see as I don’t think everything on the test should be centered around just one product; but around how a good PPC campaign is setup and managed.

One item Microsoft is set on doing (and the other engines need to follow suit) is creating a directory of it’s members.

These certifications don’t mean much (nor does any certification) without awareness. While I applaud the engines for creating programs that lets consumers know if one is qualified, the consumer awareness about these programs is exceptionally low. Hence, consumers don’t actually seek out these professionals to run their campaigns.

Engines should showcase these programs to raise awareness. Once their is awareness, then there is also an additional benefit for one to learn any of the PPC programs to the satisfaction of the engine to earn one’s qualification.

The second items the engines need to follow up with is support for the individuals who pass these programs. People who take (and pass) these programs are the most likely candidates for being product evangelists.

At present, there is no special contact phone number, email address, or skywriting for one who has any of the search engine qualifications. If one happens to be on another team, then one can get support through the normal channels. However, if one does not have an account rep, then one still has to go through the normal channels for support. These programs and qualifiers should be embraced by the engines.

Yahoo is currently in the process of restructuring their ambassador program; and Microsoft is still in beta, so maybe there is hope that some of these support channels will begin to emerge.

Quality score remains one of the more ambiguous ideas on the web. Google has become much more transparent with sharing information about AdWords quality score.

Microsoft adCenter has also announced it will use a quality score formula to determine placement. I’ve had some discussions with Microsoft digging into the full algo, however, here are some high level facts that will help you optimize for adCenter’s quality score.

• How closely related the keyword is to the ad’s content (single factor)
• How closely related the query is to the landing page (single factor)
• How closely related the keyword is to both the ad and landing page (combined factor)
• The serial chain of query to ad and then ad to landing page
• Uniqueness of the ad to other ads on the page. adCenter tries not to show duplicate ads on the page (this is an interesting one).

Overall, it’s fairly similar to Google’s.

The concept is quite simple: If you are enhancing the search process, then ads rank well. If you aren’t, then ads rank lower.

We’re now taking the next step forward. On Thursday, April 26, 2007, the current adCenter site will be upgraded with these new features, including:

• Improved navigation. Easily go to any campaign or ad group in your account via our navigation enhancements.
• Bulk edit keyword settings. Quickly make updates to negative keywords, dynamic text and destination URLs for all of your keywords.
• Enhanced campaign imports. Import new campaigns or make updates to existing campaigns with our new, robust, import feature.
• Microsoft Excel download option. You can now download all of the adCenter data sets in an Excel format.
• Full text search. From any page, find campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads that contain all or part of a search query string by using our new full text search feature.
• And more! Watch our webinar to learn more about how to make the most of these new features.

Source: adCenter blog

adCenter has some very powerful dynamic insertion commands for automatically passing data to an advertiser about a search click.

I wrote about their initial options a while ago when their dynamic functionality became stronger than Google’s dynamic link insertion.

adCenter recently updated their blog to go into some depth about passing these query strings. If you’re using dynamic link building, the entry is worth a read.

The first step to good keyword organization is to identify your ad groups. Microsoft’s adLabs has a nice tool in helping to first determine your ad groups.

The Keyword Group Detector tool lets one input a keyword and then see the related items to that keyword.

It’s similar to the often forgotten Google Sets project.

This can be very useful for finding related keywords, or starting to group similar words together.

A search for a word like ‘marketing’ will bring back related words such as advertising, ads, etc. Words that are more likely to be adjectives than ad groups.

A search for a more commercial term such as ‘ipod’, brings back ‘ipod mini’, “i-pod shuffle”, “apple i pod”. These different terms are better served in their own ad group.

The tool works off of sorting data, so it doesn’t care about spellings. Some will like this as it’s the reality of searches. Other’s won’t like this as they don’t want to make ad groups from misspellings. Either way, be aware that some of the keywords will be either misspelled or jargon.

In the above example, “ipod” can be seen to be spelled as: i pod, ipod, and i-pod. It is important to understand those are the words being searched even if they don’t translate into being an ad group.

If you are just starting down the road of organizing keywords, this can be a useful tool to do some research.

Last year Microsoft did quite a bit of TV advertising for their search products. These TV commercials didn’t seem to dent their online query share.

Ask.com has also gone down the same route, and didn’t see a large query share change.

I just saw a commercial for Microsoft adCenter on Sci-Fi. Interesting demographic, those who are watching random movies on the Sci-Fi channel at 10am (I only turned it on as I wanted background during breakfast. I have no idea what the movie is about, but had to look up when I heard adCenter).

Like many commercials these days, they are using a different link to their product, presumably to track sign-ups via their TV efforts: goadcenter.com which redirects to goadcenter.com/TV.

Microsoft believes in their adCenter product. It’s biggest downfall is the query share. It will be interesting to see how this affects their total advertising base.

Microsoft supports dynamic link insertion. I did a full write up about it a week ago. Microsoft was kind enough to go through the documentation and make suggestions of where clarification was necessary.

I’ve just updated the Microsoft adCenter Dynamic Links article with all of the appropriate information.

In addition, I also found where one can go through all of the adCenter FAQs without being logged into adCenter.

If you follow this link; and the click on ‘View More Questions’ you can access all of the adCenter FAQs (and search through them) without being logged into your account.

Dynamically adding variables into a destination URL string such as keyword, AdId, match type, etc can help send much needed information to your (or a 3rd party) tracking system.

Google supports dynamic parameters in URLs (also called valuetrack); and Microsoft adCenter supports a similar feature (although, there’s two on Microsoft which Google has never supported - the actual search query string and match type).

These variables can be added to the destination URL.

{param1} - see Param1 note below.
{keyword} - Please see keyword note below.
{MatchType}
{QueryString}
{OrderItemId}
{AdId}

Essentially, you can have your destination URL look like:

ewhisper.net?kw={keyword}&match={MatchType}&query={QueryString}&id={OrderItemId}&id={AdId}

The AdId is great for split testing conversion rates by ad type.

Keyword Note: When using the {keyword} paramanter; you can only use it for single word keywords. If they keyword is multiple words (in this example I’ll use ‘ewhisper blog’ for the URL ewhisper.net?{keyword}) the URL would become ewhisper.net?ewhisper blog. Notice the space?

The space breaks the URL so the page will be ‘not found’. However, if you were to use the actual space code (%20), the keyword would have to be ‘ewhisper%20blog’ and since that’s not a word, it’s going to be disapproved. So, until adCenter fixes the spacing problem with keywords, don’t use this param in your link unless you’re bidding on single word keywords.

Param1 Note: Param1 IS the destination URL insert. So you could have a destination URL of {param1}{OrderItemId}. However, you can’t have the destination URL of ewhisper.net?{param1} as essentialy that would become ewhisper.net?ewhisper.net.

Query String: I think the query string will be the most sought after piece of information. Right now, it’s almost impossible to tell what user query caused your ad to be displayed. With this parameter, you will have access to that information.

The query string is very valuable info. Understanding the user query string allows you to see when you don’t want your ads to show and need to add negative keywords. It also allows you to see what ads are being triggered by which keywords so you can refine or change your keywords.

The relationship between actual query sting to triggered keyword to conversions is valuable to understand. Kudos to Microsoft for finally allowing advertisers to find this information.

Microsoft is full of announcements today, and the most recent one is offering competition to Google Analytics. It’s amazing to think that there is growing competition for free programs. Analytics have traditionally been an expensive proposition, but Google and Microsoft are changing this.
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Microsoft to Offer Free Analytics