“We’re proactively reviewing paused ads to eliminate unnecessary delays in getting your ads approved and ultimately enhance your ability to plan and manage campaigns,” explains Lauren Barbato of Google’s Inside AdWords crew.

“New and existing unreviewed paused ads will be sent through the standard ad approval process,” she adds. “This means that paused ads will be subject to our AdWords advertising policies, and ads that violate one or more of our policies will be disapproved. If your paused ads were originally disapproved, it’s easy to resubmit them to be reviewed again.”

To do so, just edit and save the ad, and it will automatically resubmit to Google. Any change in approval status will be shown in the Status column. It will either say Eligible, Under Review or Disapproved.

“Just be aware that changing the actual ad (such as editing text or uploading a new image) is the same as deleting the original ad and creating a new one, so after editing the ad, any statistics will be reset to zero,” Google reminds advertisers in the help center. “The same is true when you copy an ad to another ad group.”

Google will notify the advertiser if there are any issues, and will instruct how to go about getting an ad approved. The approval process is explained here.

Bing began powering Yahoo Search, Yahoo became the exclusive search advertising provider for Bing, and Microsoft’s adCenter began operating the self-service advertising division for both companies. Although the combined companies make up almost 30 percent of search market share, both Yahoo and Bing reported declining revenues in their recent earnings reports.

Is the Yahoo-Microsoft Search Alliance falling through? What do you think?

In a recent interview with Mark Ballard, the Senior Analyst at the Rimm-Kaufman Group, he told us that the partnership was backfiring on the companies. He said that it was hurting Yahoo more than Microsoft but that both companies were struggling.

Before the Alliance, Yahoo was much more liberal in how it matched ads to search queries. Ballard told us that it previously brought in around 60 percent of broad matched traffic and that it only brings in around 40 percent of broad matched traffic now that Bing is powering it.

“It really seems that Bing’s not doing a great job at figuring out which ads to show for certain queries… there are so many queries out there and we can only have so many keywords in our account that we rely upon the engines to do some smart matching,” he said.

Yahoo has definitely felt the heat from these results and, in its April earnings report, openly blamed Microsoft for its struggles. While Ballard believes some of the fault lies with Microsoft, he also pointed out that Yahoo should have considered this type of outcome before it agreed to an Alliance.

Microsoft has also been blasted for its failure to bring about significant improvements through the partnership. Reuters analyst Robert Cyran even suggested that Microsoft sell Bing and indicated that Facebook or Apple could do more with the search engine.

“Even though their revenues are growing, they’re still bleeding money on Bing,” said Ballard. “I think Microsoft probably is willing to take a loss on Bing because they see it as part of a larger strategy. Whether or not that larger strategy makes sense – I guess that’s for the C-level folks at Microsoft to decide.”

In a post he wrote on this topic, he pointed out that Bing could pull in more revenue by bringing on more search partners. This, however, would not be good for advertisers, since partner traffic is usually very poor quality.

Ballard believes that Bing needs to make technological changes and open their broad match to make it smarter. In addition, he told us that Bing needed to invest in ad innovations that are more appealing to users, which would deliver higher click-through-rates for advertisers. For example, Google has enhanced its ad formats in ways that go beyond the normal text ad.

He would also like to see Bing add more real estate for ads on Bing.com. If the search engine makes these adjustments, Ballard thinks both Yahoo and Bing would see a noticeable difference.

“We’re rooting for Bing and Yahoo,” he said. “They have the traffic, and we’d like to take advantage of it.”

Can Yahoo and Microsoft turn their Search Alliance around and on the right track?

Google says its statisticians have run over 400 studies on accounts with paused paid search campaigns to gain some insight into how paid search affects organic clicks for websites.

“In what we call ‘Search Ads Pause Studies’, our group of researchers observed organic click volume in the absence of search ads,” Google’s Quantitative Management team said in a post on the Google Research Blog. “Then they built a statistical model to predict the click volume for given levels of ad spend using spend and organic impression volume as predictors. These models generated estimates for the incremental clicks attributable to search ads (IAC), or in other words, the percentage of paid clicks that are not made up for by organic clicks when search ads are paused.”

“The results were surprising,” the team added. “On average, the incremental ad clicks percentage across verticals is 89%. This means that a full 89% of the traffic generated by search ads is not replaced by organic clicks when ads are paused. This number was consistently high across verticals.”

Hmm. Sounds like you should really be spending money paying for Google ads…at least according to Google.

David X. Chan, Yuan Yuan, Jim Koehler, and Deepak Kumar explain in the report:

In order to determine the incremental clicks related to search advertising, we quantify the impact pausing search ad spend has on total clicks. Indirect navigation to the advertiser site is not considered. Each study produces an estimate of the incremental clicks attributed to search advertising for an advertiser. To make comparison across multiple studies easier, we express the incremental clicks as a percentage of the change in paid clicks. This metric is labeled \Incremental Ad Clicks”, or \IAC” for short.

IAC represents the percentage of paid clicks that are not made up for by organic clicks when ads are paused. Conversely, when the campaign is restarted, the IAC represents the fraction of paid clicks that are incremental. Since we do not assume a positive interaction between paid and organic search in our analysis, the IAC estimate is bounded at 100%.

The team does acknowledge that it has not conducted enough studies to determine the impact of seasonality on the results.

The full report can be read here (pdf).

The report is based on a survey of digital media that showed increases in year-over-year spend across paid search, display advertising, and Facebook. Facebook advertising, the firm says, was particularly strong.

This would somewhat reflect another recent report from MerchantCircle, which found that Facebook ads are gaining popularity among small businesses.

According to the IgnitionOne survey, Facebook advertising spend is up 22% year-over-year on a same-client-basis, with impressions up 11%.

“However, Facebook advertising has experienced high rates of growth from new marketer adoption in the past year, contributing a 280% increase in spend across all clients, and 200% increase in impressions YOY,” IgnitionOne tells WebProNews. “Spending patterns within an advertiser’s campaign lifecycle show marked growth declines after the first few months, suggesting advertisers are still in a ‘test and learn’ phase with the new and immature ad platform.”

Despite the increasing success of Facebook ads, Google was still the “standout performer,” according to the firm. Google showed grew to 80% share of all U.S. search advertising spend in Q2, compared with Yahoo/Bing at 19% share. “Google also saw dominating growth in other key search metrics, including impressions, clicks, CTR and eCPM,” the firm tells us. “Google’s AdEx commands 51% share of U.S. RTB display spend, compared to Yahoo!’s Right Media at 49% share. This marks a significant jump in Google’s market share in display YOY.”

It will be interesting to see how a jump in market share might impact a pending Department of Justice probe of Google’s pending acquisition of ad-optimization platform AdMeld. The investigation is aimed at determining if Google’s dominance in search advertising could make this an anticompetitive buy, and will examine Google’s plans for expansion strategies related to the acquisition. Google, of course, says that this is not an anti-competitive acquisition.

“The acquisition is designed to help publishers get the most from the rapidly growing display advertising industry, which is both complicated and incredibly competitive — the emergence in recent years of a huge variety of technologies for publishers, like Admeld’s, is great evidence of that,” a Google spokesperson is quoted as saying. The Federal Trade Commission has since launched its own antitrust investigation into Google’s broader business practices.

U.S. paid search spend grew a steady 12% year-over-year in Q2, and was flat compared with Q1 growth, according to IgnitionOne. “The quarter began strong, but dipped sharply in June to nearly flat growth on a YOY basis,” the firm says. “While this decline did not have a significant impact on the quarter overall, it could be an indicator of future months’ performance, and expectations for Q3 are cautiously optimistic.”

Google launched its latest attempt at a social network today. While it is being released under the veil of an early-stages project, it will be interesting to see what impact it might have on Google’s advertising offerings in the months and years ahead.

You may recall when Google launched Instant Previews for search results. These let the user click the little magnifying glass to get a visual preview of what the site will look like before they click on the result itself. The whole thing really made it clear that having an attractive design could only benefit you in the Google user interface.

Now the same thing applies to your ads’ landing pages.

“Now, we’re bringing the same benefit to ads with Instant Previews for Ads,” writes Google’s Dan Friedman on the Inside AdWords blog. “Starting today [last night, actually], the Instant Previews icon will appear next to ads on Google.com allowing users to preview the ad’s landing page. With Instant Previews, your customers are able to quickly preview a page to see if its content matches what they’re searching for.”

“By allowing potential customers to preview your site before they arrive, Instant Previews helps you get even more highly-qualified traffic to your site,” he adds. “Even better, Instant Preview clicks are free of charge — you’re only charged if a user clicks through to your actual landing page.”

Landing pages are obviously very important to the conversion process, so if you didn’t have an effective landing page to begin with, you weren’t going to have much luck in your search marketing. The Instant Previews should only serve to emphasize that very fact.

I would like to see some data from Google on how often people actually click for instant previews. Personally, I rarely do. It’s just an extra step. I can just as easily see the page by clicking on the result once I get there (and I don’t know how up-to-date the preview actually is). I can’t speak for the average user though. I’m sure some people are clicking on them.

If you’re an advertiser, and you don’t like the idea of the instant previews, there’s not a whole lot you can do it about it. It’s not an optional feature. It’s just how it is now. ” Instant Previews are an integral part of the AdWords search and ads experience for users and advertisers,” Google says.

In case you’re wondering, Google will not charge you if someone clicks a preview, so that’s certainly a positive. It could actually save you some money in the long run.

The previews do not affect quality score in any way. That said, Google does say it will respect robots.txt if you’ve explicitly excluded AdsBot-Google. “However, this will have significant impact on your Quality Score as we’ll no longer be able to assess your landing page quality,” the company says.

“The nosnippet’ tag relates only to organic web search,” Google adds. “We’ll continue to show Instant Previews on ads even if the nosnippet tag is present on the ad’s landing page.”

The feature is already rolling out in the U.S. Google says it will roll it out internationally over the coming weeks.

Adobe announced today that SearchCenter+ now allows users to integrate data from both paid search campaigns and organic SEO. 

"Our customers derive significant value from our ability to serve as the hub to gather, analyze and take action on their valuable marketing data,” said John Mellor, VP, strategy and business development at Adobe’s  Omniture Business Unit. "Customers use SearchCenter+ to collectively manage more than $1 billion of the global paid search spend. Adobe now helps search marketers ensure that their paid search initiatives do not compete with or cannibalize the search volume they’re already receiving from natural search.”

Users can measure paid and organic search rankings, onsite engagement, or conversions in one report, use performance of natural search to adjust their paid search bids, gain insight to help in making keyword bidding decisions, etc. 

The new version of SearchCenter+ is currently in beta, and is expected to become generally available in the second quarter.

The Omniture acquisition has been big in terms of making Adobe a bigger deal for search marketers. Late last year, the company also introduced a tool for site search, aimed at helping marketers anticipate visitor search intent and promote relevant products and content. 

WebProNews took a few moments to talk about the transition with PPC expert Christine Churchill of Key Relevance at PubCon in Las Vegas. "One of the things that we’ve done to help clients move and transition over to the adCenter…because a lot of them start with Google, and they get their sites optimized and their campaigns optimized in Google because there’s some great tools and the user interface is pretty well established," she says.  

"adCenter is a much newer system even though it’s been out for several years, it still has a few little glitches," she continues. "And one thing that you can do if you’re a business owner, and you’re running your own account…there’s a nice litte free downloadable tool that Google has – the AdWords Editor – something you can do is download your campaigns – your account – into the AdWords Editor and then export it into a spreadsheet and do some tweaking. It’s not a straight transfer into the adCenter, but you can use that as a transition tool. It really helps a lot of businesses."

"Some of the areas you’re going to have to transition and tweak is your negative keywords, your geo-targeting, and things like that, so it’s not perfect, but it gets the bulk of the transition done for you, so you don’t have to do it all – all that GUI interface of typing things in, which is an absolute nightmare, [and] very repetitive process, so that will save people a lot of time," adds Churchill. 

When asked if it seems like advertisers seem to prefer the combination of Yahoo and Microsoft to the separate entities, she says, "I think it varies on the advertiser. I think it’s still very new, so I think anything they say right now…give it a few months. Let some of the initial bugs work out and meanwhile keep advertising on Google, but don’t give up on adCenter. I think that it’ll prove in the long term to be a beneficial thing, because there’s another opportunity [to] get in front of potential customers, so I see it as a good thing long term." 

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WebProNews also spoke with David Roth, Yahoo’s own director of search marketing, who obviously offers a slightly different perspective on the transition, given that he not only works for Yahoo, but does paid search marketing for the company himself. 

"Now, for me, I’ve got kind of an unusual view on this because I am not only an advertiser, but Yahoo’s also a publisher, so we transitioned all of our advertising like everybody did," said Roth. "So now we’re using adCenter to manage our Yahoo and our Bing buy, but we also monetize search results all over Yahoo, and so we transitioned in two different ways. So for me it was really interesting to see how metrics shift, you know, as the market place shifts, and now all the work that we have to do to try to re-optimize our campaigns and adjust to how the new ecosystem works, as opposed to the old one."

"The thing that I noticed mostly, and [these are] kind of some basic principles or best practices, that one of the things I thought that we as advertisers could’ve done better, was to be more aggressive with what we were doing on adCenter, because we do want to make sure that all that traffic is shifting over there, and I think that when we went into it, we thought, ‘well, we’ll start with our best keywords. We’ll start with our top performers,’ but what we realized very quickly was that we really needed to move everything over there, and we needed to be as aggressive as possible in growing out our adCenter campaigns and keywords and ad groups, because we needed that in order to try to preserve the level of quantity and quality of traffic that we were getting previously," said Roth.

Yahoo and Microsoft have a detailed transition checklist for advertisers, which can be found here. 

Are you an advertiser? Tell us how the transition has worked out for you.

"Whether you prefer to tweet, post a question in our forums or pick up the phone and speak to a real person, you’ve got several options for getting help with all things adCenter," says Microsoft’s Tina Kelleher. 

The transition is of course already underway, but may take some time to be completed globally. Right now, they have contact information posted for the US, UK, Canada, France, and Singapore markets. 

Nielsen announced today that Bing has surpassed Yahoo in search market share for the United State for the first time, and that is not even taking the partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo into consideration. 

Microsoft began powering Yahoo’s organic search results on August 24.

ACE, as Google says, is designed to reduce guesswork and risk involved with making changes to a campaign. It provides a split-testing approach to give measurements regardless of changes in demand, competitor movements, or other activity that can complicate things. 

According to Google’s Jason Shafton, ACE would come in useful in the following scenarios:

• You have a few keywords that account for a significant fraction of your total AdWords clicks, conversions and cost. You’d like to know what happens if you raise (or lower) bids by 10%. Do your clicks and conversions change by 10% — or maybe less than that? How would your cost per click and cost per conversion change?

• You want to easily test a new landing page design tailored for a few high-value keywords against your existing landing page*.

• A colleague suggests you might improve your Google Display Network campaign performance by adjusting keywords and adding some placement-specific bids, but you’re concerned you might wind up with fewer conversions and no improvement in cost per conversion.

"The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft," says Yahoo’s VP of Search Product Operations, Kartik Ramakrishnan. "However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you’re used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing."

Yahoo provides the following example, in which the Microsoft-powered parts are represented by the boxes:

As far as SEO is concerned, the Yahoo Search Marketing Team provides the following tips for organic search:

1. Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
2. Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
3. Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella also says that "now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition."

The Bingbot is designed to crawl non-optimized sties more easily. The new Bingbot will replace the existing msnbot in October. More on this here.

Also note that the new Bing Webmaster Tools experience is live. This has been completely redone with a  bunch of new features (and more features to come). Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager Anthony M. Garcia summarizes:

The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo out at SMX a while back. She had presented on the topic of Bing SEO vs. Organic SEO. As she notes, some businesses actually see better results from Bing than they do from Google, and when Yahoo starts fully using Bing for search, Bing’s share of the search market is going to grow dramatically (it also powers search in Facebook, let’s not forget).

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Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft’s mobile organic and paid listings in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. The company anticipates that U.S. and Canada organic listings in both the desktop and mobile versions of its search will be fully powered by Microsoft as early as August or September. This of course depends on how the testing goes.

Yahoo and Microsoft have created new joint editorial guidelines for advertisers that will become effective in early August. These can be found here.

As we’ve discussed, Bing optimization is about to get more important, and now the time has come to really look at your Bing strategy if you’ve not already been doing so.

Are you prepared for the transition? Comment here.