“As we recently reported, search engine marketing continues to grow as a proportion of digital ad budgets, and the Yahoo! Bing Network is outpacing the competition on key metrics like click-through rate,” says the Yahoo advertising team in a blog post. “The most recent comScore numbers are also telling when looking at the Buying Power Index (BPI) — which is a measure of purchase behavior — for all searchers on Yahoo! and Bing.”

“According to comScore, searchers on the Yahoo! Bing Network are likely to spend 123% more than the average Internet searcher,” the team adds. “The worldwide BPI for Yahoo! and Bing searchers who don’t use Google (that’s 83 million, by the way!) is even more dramatic, with spending levels 317% more than the average Internet searcher. So with the Yahoo! Bing Network, you don’t have to search hard to find the highest quality audience in the world!”

A report from Kenshoo also showed that Yahoo Bing Networks CTRs and CPCs are consistently higher than Google’s.

Yahoo shares a map showing the status of Yahoo Bing Network implementation in various countries around the globe:

“Bing Ads is not only a new name, but an improved experience with new features to help you better manage your campaigns and complete tasks faster,” says Microsoft’s Tina Kelleher. “Recent improvements include: a new web interface, improved ad rotation controls, and agency enablement tools that make it easier for agencies to manage multiple accounts.”

David Pann outlines the changes as:

Historic Quality Score helps advertisers closely monitor their campaign performance trend and proactively respond to the competition.

The Bing Ads Intelligence tool provides access to customizable marketplace level information that allows advertisers to make proactive decisions regarding their campaign management.

Pann also notes that there is a new Import Campaign feature (for importing from AdWords), and a new Editorial Exceptions feature for resolving editorial disapprovals during and after the ad submission process.

Additional updates are on the way, Kelleher says.

Microsoft and Yahoo say that the network (in the U.S.), consisting of Yahoo and Microsoft’s core search sites, accounts for 30% of the search share, and reaches 151 million searchers who are likely to spend 124% more than the average searcher, and 5% more than Google searchers. The companies say advertisers can reach 46 million unique searchers in the U.S. who aren’t using Google.

“A similar result holds true worldwide, with 489 million unique searchers, 92 million of whom do not use Google; and worldwide the Yahoo! Bing Network represents an audience who is likely to spend 124% more than the average searcher and 78% more than Google searchers worldwide,” the companies say.

“In addition to Yahoo! and Microsoft Core Search sites, the Yahoo! Bing Network represents partner sites like Facebook, Amazon, Monster, WebMD, CNBC, and Viacom, plus networks like The Wall Street Journal Digital Network,” the companies add.

Advertisers would do well to note that Bing has been revealed as the default search on Amazon’s new line of Kindle Fire devices.

“Previously, we would show seller rating extensions only for advertisers that have at least 30 lifetime reviews and a 4-star average,” explains AdWords product manager Liza Ma. “Moving forward, we will only show seller rating extensions for advertisers that have at least 30 reviews over the last 12 months and a 4-star average.”

“Since customer opinions about a business can evolve over time, this change will help make seller rating extensions more useful and relevant for searchers,” adds Ma. “It should also benefit businesses that satisfy customers and garner positive reviews on an ongoing basis.”

According to Google, the extensions often lead to higher clickthrough rates.

Last week, Google announced some new local targeting options in 11 countries.

Do you get a bigger bang from your buck from SEO, PPC or social media marketing? Let us know in the comments.

Webmarketing123 has put out some interesting survey results for its State of Digital Marketing 2012 report. It looks at B2B vs. B2C marketing efforts in terms of SEO, PPC and social media. We’ll focus on the B2B side of things here. Among other things, it looks specifically at the satisfaction levels of in-house/agency search marketing and social media efforts, as well as how much money businesses are putting into different social networks, and how much they’re getting back.

The survey included companies like Sony, Olympus, Phillips, IBM, Hitatchi, Cisco, Agilent, Microsoft, Citrix, Medtronic, Merck, Novo Nordisk, Blue Shield, ADP, Pitney Bowes, Monster.com, Angie’s List, GE, John Deere, Aramark, Thomson Reuters, Federal Express, Bose, and Nestlé. In all, over 500 marketing professionals from the U.S. responded to the survey.

The main B2B takeaways appear to be that lead generation is the top objective among brands, and SEO is found to be twice as effective as either PPC or social media marketing. This is quite interesting, considering that it is getting harder and harder to get on the first page of Google results. Of course, there are some major brands that took this survey, and they likely don’t struggle with rankings as much as some smaller businesses.

According to the survey, about 50% more B2Bs now consider social media as having the most impact on lead generation, compared to last year, though SEO is still significantly ahead.

Based on the surveys findings, most B2B businesses engage in SEO, and do so in-house, rather than hiring agencies. Almost all of them either intend to increase their SEO budgets in 2013 or at least maintain their current budgets.

According to the survey, the most common measures of SEO performance are the volume of traffic, organic traffic, and the number of keywords appearing on page 1, “which give no insight into financial impact.” Fewer marketers, Webmaketing123 says, are employing “more sophisticated measures,” like number of qualified leads or sales attributable to organic search.

Here’s a look at how businesses are doing their PPC, and what their budget plans look like:

Here’s a similar look at how businesses are doing social media, and what their budget plans look like:

Interestingly, while in-house dominates the efforts of businesses across SEO, PPC and social media, the satisfaction levels are significantly higher when outside agencies are hired, according to the survey:

According to the survey, B2C businesses are getting more engagement than B2B businesses from their social media efforts, but the gap is narrowing. B2B businesses are getting better at social media.

“B2C marketers are ahead with 70% moderately to highly engaged (40% highly engaged), but B2B is catching up, with 63% at those levels of engagement (27% highly engaged), overall, only 1 in 10 have no social media program,” the firm says.

It probably helps that the social networks are putting out more business-oriented products. Facebook, since the IPO, has certainly had businesses on the brain (even at the cost of user-friendliness, perhaps), launching more and more ad products and targeting capabilities for posts. Twitter, just this past week, announced new ad targeting options of its own, as well as the Certified Product Program for businesses. Google also announced some new business-specific features for Google+ this past week.

As these networks continue to cater more to businesses, businesses are likely to find them more valuable, and perhaps find more room in their budgets to take advantage. However, it is the social network that has always been business-oriented, that currently seems to be providing the biggest bang for B2B business’ bucks.

Last, but not least, Webmarketing123 provides a look at the break down of dollars spent among popular social networks, and money made from them. It looks like businesses are getting the most out of their dollars spent with LinkedIn, though for B2C, Facebook blows LinkedIn out of the water. This makes sense, however, if you consider the professional nature of LinkedIn.

Businesses may soon be able to get even more out of LinkedIn, as the company just expanded LinkedIn ads into 17 new languages. The company is also improving its developer platform, which could lead to some more business opportunities.

From which social networks are you getting the most ROI? Are you getting more from SEO or PPC? In-house or agency? Let us know what’s working for your business.

Google announced that the new AdWords look is now rolling out globally.

“The new look simplifies the interface with newly designed menus, tabs, navigation, and buttons so that the important things — such as your data — stand out,” explains Greg Rosenberg with Google’s AdWords User Experience Team. “The latest web technologies have been used to make the interface more visually appealing and zippy, while keeping the features where you are accustomed to finding them.”

Earlier this month, Google offered a preview of the new look. Below are some screen caps:

Homepage:

Keywords Tab:

New Campaign Page:

The new look will be rolling out over the next several days to all accounts.

SMX’s description of the session says, “Our mad scientists emerge from their PPC labs, where they’ve been assembling keywords words, bidding strategies and other assorted parts into monster PPC campaigns. Attend this session to see how they’ve successfully enhanced paid search performance with rigorous testing and trial and error. Their creations are abnormally effective!”

The speakers list was as follows:

Moderator: Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster (@mvanwagner)
Q&A Moderator: Joseph Kerschbaum, Vice President of Client Services, Clix Marketing (@joekerschbaum)
Speakers:
Michael Behrens, SVP eMarketing, WebMetro (@MichaelBehrens)
Benny Blum, Director, Strategy & Analytics, eSearchVision (@bennyblum)
Ryan Hutchings, Director, Online Marketing, VacationRoost
Matthew Mierzejewski, Vice President of PPC, RKG

As usual, attendees tweeted their own takeaways and highlights from the panel. Here’s the best of what was said:

Microsoft wrote a blog post about the session on its adCenter blog, including a list of tips for “taking back control”:

• Use negative keywords
• Force matching through negatives
• Conducive account structure
• Tightly themed ad groups
• Maximize ad group match length rule
• Easier negative implementation
• Choose match types carefully
• Phrase OR Broad (almost duplicate) ?
• Broad OR Broad Match Modified ?
• Remove duplicates/ambiguous
• Maintain campaign budgets

These were from Michael Behrens’ presentation. Check out their post for a more complete recap.

Image: Aqua Teen Hunger Force (via YouTube)

It’s available in the Opportunities tab in AdWords, and lets you view bid changes (in aggregate) and model changes, “even when keywords or ad groups might not have enough data for this on their own,” according to AdWords Product manager Sheridan Kates.

“See what might happen if you increased or decreased all your bids by a specific percentage (10%, for example),” says Kates, listing the functions. “See whether you may need to increase your campaign budget to ensure it doesn’t become limited by budget at the new bid value.”

With the feature, you can also see what would happen if you changed all your bids to a single value.

From the campaign bid simulator, you can download bid simulation data (at the account or campaign level) and a file (compatible with AdWords Editor) with bid amounts at the simulated level, and the ad groups/keywords where they should be applied, according to Google.

At the time, a Google spokesperson told WebProNews, “We actually haven’t announced anything on this and don’t have any more info to share at this time-we frequently beta test new features with agency partners.”

Now, the features have been officially announced. Google gives the following examples of how things will work:

1. waterproof sunblock     buy bollard cover     single serving coffee maker
2. waterpoof sunblock      buy bollard covers    single serve coffee maker

Right now, only the first row would be considered matches, which would trigger the appearance of an ad, but once the features launch, the second row would be included as well. This should open up the door for a lot more impressions.

“People aren’t perfect spellers or typists. At least 7% of search queries contain a misspelling, and the longer the query, the higher the rate,” says AdWords Product Manager Jen Huang. “Even with perfect spelling, two people searching for the same thing often use slightly different variations, such as ‘kid scooters’ and ‘kid’s scooter’ or ‘bamboo floor’ and ‘bamboo flooring.’”

Huang shares a quote from one of the testers on the Inside AdWords blog:

“Previously we spent a lot of time making sure to include hundreds of versions of brand misspellings and to include plural forms of all our keywords,” said Dana Freund, Senior SEM Manager at GameDuell. “With the improvements to exact and phrase match we don’t have to worry about these keywords anymore. We get more relevant impressions for a smaller number of keywords, and it’s been a significant time saver for us.”

Google says the changes will actually go live in mid-May, but for the time being (over the coming weeks), they’ll be rolling out controls for advertisers to get prepared. These, Google says, will allow advertisers to adjust keyword matching options, and will be found under “Advanced Settings in Campaign Settings. From that section, you’d go to Keyword Matching Options.

More on the features soon.

The ad transition officially begins on April 18.

“Next week, we begin to shift ad serving for Yahoo! Search over to Microsoft Advertising adCenter,” says Microsoft’s Cedric Chambraz. “This means that adCenter ads will gradually be displayed on Yahoo! Search result pages in the UK, France and Ireland. This process will begin as early as the 18th of April and is expected to conclude during the last week of the month when 100% of the Yahoo! traffic will be made available in adCenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing accounts will go in read-only mode.”

“As Yahoo! ad serving moves to adCenter, and your clicks and impressions in that account begin to increase, you’ll see a corresponding decrease in clicks and impressions in your Yahoo! Search Marketing account,” he adds. “It is thus important to continue managing your campaigns across both platforms throughout this transition phase, in order to avoid missing out on any potential clicks. To help you prepare, I wanted to share the following guidance to assist you through this transition.”

There’s a “transition portal” in the adCenter tab when you sign into your Yahoo account, which you can use to complete the transition, which the companies are urging you to do sooner rather than later, if you’re in one of these countries.

The companies also suggest increasing your adCenter budget (go figure) to prepare for increased traffic, once Yahoo search traffic starts to flood adCenter.

According to Microsoft, Germany, Austria and Switzerland will be getting the search alliance treatment in the coming months.

Chris Copeland, CEO of GroupM Search, wrote a piece for AdAge, saying that Google is about to push “near match” ad targeting from beta to mainstream. There is virtually no other discussion about this feature currently happening, as far as I can tell.

We reached out to Google, who readily responded to questions about the new Google+ redesign (though vague in their answers as usual), but they have so far been silent on questions related to Near Match.

“The beta, Near Match, is designed to ‘enable you to safely extend the reach of your Exact and Phrase Match keywords to cover plural, misspelling, close rewrite, abbreviation and acronym variants only,’” explains Copeland. “In previewing the beta for advertisers, Google has suggested a 6.5% increase in click volume and a 9.8% increase in impression volume. Appealing for marketers, but at what cost? We know that digital auctions and publisher revenue thrive, in part, due to a lack of data to inform smarter bidding.”

There was a bit of discussion about the “near exact” and “near phrase” match types back in November, which would reportedly be offered alongside of broad, broad match modified, phrase and exact. Agenda21′s head of PPC, Matt Holland, wrote at the time, “From the 14th November Google will be running this new beta test match types that will slightly broaden the reach of Exact and Phrase match keywords with syntactic variants including; plurals, misspells, acronyms and abbreviations but not synonyms. The idea being that this will be for advertisers who wish to increase their coverage and volume on Exact and Phrase match keywords and help them find incremental traffic with minimum effort.”

J. Prentice Parton spotted this several days ago:

You can tell that advertisers are already getting excited about it:

According to Copeland, Google is “changing the game” as it prepares to reports its earnings on Thursday, following a report in January, which disappointed shareholders with an 8% decrease in CPCs. We talked about this earlier this week, as there seems to be concern about mobile becoming a revenue problem for Google, as the CPCs aren’t increasing enough to keep up with the mobile clicks.

Google will release its Q1 earnings report on Thursday. Between CPCs and the new Google+, there should be plenty to talk about. I’m hoping Project Glass is brought up at least once. Of course there’s plenty of ad revenue opportunities there: