“Over the last two weeks, adCenter has released its latest round of pre-holiday features, all delivering on advertisers’ wish lists of improving campaign performance, increasing volume, and simplifying processes to help save time,” a spokesperson tells WebProNews.

Features include a redesigned web user interface, an upgrade to the adCenter Desktop, and the release of several performance reporting tools.

Microsoft outlines each of these.

The interface:

• Simplified Campaign Set Up for creating campaigns and ad groups, and a sleek, new single-page view with real-time previews and keyword suggestion, enabling quicker campaign deployment.
• Improvements to Navigation & Discovery to help advertisers manage across their entire account by viewing and editing keywords and ads across multiple campaigns and ad-groups at once.
• Improvements to Campaign Reporting with new multi-metric trend charts, delivery status notification features and positional bid estimates.
• Improvements to Editing with in-line editing, in-line bid editing, and best position estimations in the keywords grid.

The desktop:

• New Welcome Screen takes advertisers on an end-to-end tour of the Desktop tool to help them get set up and started quickly.
• An expanded Import Campaigns feature to allow advertisers to easily and directly import their Google AdWords campaign data into the Desktop.
• Clipboard support to enable basic copy and paste functionality so that advertisers can quickly and easily copy data and move it to, from, and within Desktop.
• Bulk bid suggestions to offer more than 1,000 keywords and let advertisers easily apply changes in order to increase traffic.
• Simplified Targeting with a default set to the advertisers’ account location, determined by the language listed in their Desktop settings.

Tools:

• New, improved Opportunities Tab that includes bid suggestions for exact/broad match and in-line editing. With this new feature advertisers can easily address underperforming bids to target more volume.
• New Share of Voice feature that quantifies missed impressions in Account, Campaign, and Ad Group performance reports, and helps prioritize optimizations more effectively.
• Improved historical and aggregated Quality Score data to allow advertisers to view aggregated quality score by summary or by time frame, including hour, day, week or month.
• An upgrade to Change History reports so advertisers can view targeting changes and gain better insights into campaign performance related to those changes.

For those of you who aren’t advertising with adCenter, remember that these things apply to Bing and Yahoo advertisers.

“Currently (and for campaigns that don’t have Social Extensions enabled) your AdWords ads only show +1’s from people who have +1’d that ad’s landing page,” explains Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew. “This limits the likelihood that someone who sees your ad will have a friend or contact who’s recommended it. By enabling Social Extensions on your ad campaigns you’re able to leverage all the +1’s your brand has received, whether it be on a search result, on your Google+ Page, your website or on your ads, making it more likely that someone who sees your ad will have a friend or contact who has recommended it.”

“We believe that this has the potential to improve your overall ad performance,” he adds. “In fact, 71% of shoppers say that recommendations from friends and family impact their purchasing decisions. These additional recommendations may result in more conversions and deeper engagement with your business overall.”

That stat comes from a Harris Interactive poll from last year. There’s a good chance that the number is even greater now, with social penetrating search more and more.

There is also a new reporting segment for AdWords, which Google says will help advertisers better understand the impact of social annotations on their campaigns. Advertisers can now segment campaigns by ad groups, keywords or by +1 annotations.

+1 annotations will let you view metrics for impressions where the viewer had a friend or contact that +1’d your brand, impressions that included an anonymous count of people who +1’d your brand, and impressions without any social annotations. The segment works with all campaigns, regardless of whether or not you enabled Social Extensions.

You can enable Social Extensions by clicking “Ad Extensions” in your AdWords account and finding the option in the rop down menu. Choose new extension. Google will ask you to add your verified Google+ Page URL.

Google talks about how to get your Profile or Page verified here. “If we think you or your page might benefit from a badge, we’ll reach out to manually verify you,” the company says. “If you believe a profile or page is impersonating you or your business, report the profile or page and select the ‘Impersonation’ option.

If you have a verified profile or page and change your name, even by a single character, your verification status will be reset and you’ll need to be re-verified.”

If you change the Page associated with your AdWords campaign, the campaign will begin adding +1’s on your ad to the Page’s total.

Social extensions are available in all countries. Advertisers will be charged for standard clicks on text ads when users click the ad text, but not when a user +1’s the ad.

Social extensions can appear in an ad when it’s shown on Google.com as well as throughout the Google Display Network. That applies to both desktop and mobile. The feature is compatible with all AdWords targeting options.

The feature is not “yet” accessible via AdWords Editor or the AdWords API. Given that Google made a point of saying “yet,” I assume that will change in the future.

“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?

What if you don’t want the feature on your ads though? Do you have a choice? Perhaps you feel like it could lead to more clicks that you don’t want to pay for. One advertiser shared a story with WebProNews about just such a scenario, and discussed his struggle trying to opt out of the feature, which has so far been unsuccessful.

Should advertisers be able to opt out from having +1 buttons on their search ads? Tell us what you think.

First, here’s how Google explains the +1 button in relation to AdWords:

When making decisions, people often turn to those they trust for recommendations. Now with the +1 button, people can recommend your site’s content or ads to their friends and contacts right when their advice is most useful – on Google search.

When Brian’s friend Ann plans her trip to Spain, she signs in to her Google account, searches on Google, and also sees your hotel’s ad – plus the personalized annotation that Brian +1’d it. Knowing that Brian recommends your hotel helps Ann decide where to stay during her travels.

“I was informed by a standard email presumably sent to all AdWords advertisers advising of +1 and explaining that AdWords would be visible within the +1 social network, meaning that if Bill clicks on my advert then all of Bill’s +1 friends are also shown my advert and therefore invited to click on it also,” Jon, an AdWords advertiser tells WebProNews.

Jon’s business is a campground, and he claims to have strong geographic and language preferences, and his AdWords account set so that his ads only appear on search engine results. “I am an ex IT consultant and very Internet savvy,” he says. “I fine tune my AdWords campaigns.”

“I don’t want to have my adverts shown on the +1 network,” he tells us. “The principle reason is that I only want to spend money reaching totally virgin customers. The reason for this is that campers are social animals, and as soon as Bill finds a great campground he will tell all his camping buddies. I don’t need help from Google getting referrals via this mechanism. Once Bill knows I am content to wait until Bill tells his friends verbally or via email, that does not cost me a dime.”

“The other objection is that Bill may have friends in other geographic locations who may speculatively click on my advert as exposed to them via Bill and the +1 network, whereas previously I could limit geographic scope on my AdWords campaign,” he adds. “And Bill is intelligent enough to know which of his online buddies lives too far away to find my campground of interest – and anyway I am not paying for Bill’s verbal or email recommendations.”

Jon pointed to the hassle he has had trying to opt out of +1′s on his ads. “Last time I looked there was no ‘+1′ opt out on the AdWords users’ control panel – I expected just to login and tick the appropriate ‘NO’ box and all would be cool (I was still irritated that I was opted in by default, but hey they are trying to make money aren’t they?).”

“Nope – you have to hunt around documentation to find a buried ‘opt out form’. By buried I mean that Google clearly don’t want you to find it easily,” he says. “You have to read FAQs and things first.”

The form looks like this:

“When I tried the form it didn’t work. It failed to give a confirmation page and instead indicated a field error by stipulating ‘required field’ in red, but unfortunately this was next to the very tick box that I deselected to indicate that I wanted to opt out,” he says. “I worked in IT for 15 years and I can design a bug free form in my sleep but Google engineers needed two attempts over two weeks with me sending screen shots and verifying that I had tried multiple browsers and so on.”

“After about two weeks of Googles ‘experts’ working on the issue they got the form working so I was able to indicate that I wanted to opt out,” he continues. “Then I followed up by indicating my lack of confidence in this whole setup with the Google guy who has been handling my case and asked when I was going to actually hear anything . You see, the opt out option is not a ‘right’ or an immediate thing – it is a ‘REQUEST’.”

Jon claims a Google employee told him:

Hi Jon,

>From the form: “We will review these requests and may contact you at the
e-mail address provided.” – notice it says may, not will.

“So you see I have only managed to get on the waiting lists to be ‘CONSIDERED’ for opt out, and apparently I can only be sure that I will be contacted if my ‘REQUEST IS GRANTED’,” Jon says. “May I reiterate here that I am ‘requesting’ the right to decide how my advertising revenue is spent. I know my customers and I believe that the +1 network will deliver only what I get for free right now but at a price.”

“I am not against +1 or its incorporation into AdWords, but I am really annoyed that Google has first of all opted me in by default, then provided me with a buggy opt out mechanism that takes two weeks to fix, and then tells me as if a royal speaking to a subject that what I consider to be a ‘DEMAND’ is actually a ‘REQUEST’, and that I ‘MAY’ be contacted if they decide to ‘GRANT’ me the right to decide how my money is spent.”

What do you think of Jon’s story? Should opting out of this feature be a right or is it simply Google’s right to handle this feature of its product how it sees fit? Tell us what you think in the comments.

The product is aimed at local businesses who aren’t already using AdWords. “AdWords Express helps potential customers find your website or Place page, and gives you a quick and straightforward way to connect with them and grow your business,” explains AdWords Express Product Mangager Kiley McEvoy. “You simply provide some basic business information, create your ad, and your campaign is ready to go.”

“After you sign up, the campaign will be automatically managed for you,” continues McEvoy. “AdWords Express will figure out which searches should trigger your ad to appear and displays it when these searches happen. Your ad will be shown in the Ads section of search results pages—on the top or right hand side—and in Google Maps with a distinctive blue pin. Customers can see your ad whether they’re searching on laptops or mobile phones.”

According to the company, AdWords Express automatically optimizes ads to get the most out of the campaign and the budget.

To use the product, the only thing you need is a mailing address, which you can make private. You don’t even need a website, as your Google Place Page can serve as your landing page.

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).

Nor do we know, if Google does make this widely available, whether it will be standard or optional for the advertiser. Affiliate marketer Vinny O’Hare was able to capture a screenshot (hat tip: Search Engine Land):

“I was up late watching tv when I saw a commercial for the Oreck air purifier and since I didn’t want to sit there for a half hour to learn the price I went to Google to see what they are going for,” writes O’Hare. “I was surprised to see the amount of clicks the advertisers has mixed in with the PPC ads on the results page. Knowing this can’t be a normal thing I took a screen shot of it. Click on the image to see it in full size. I am not sure Google wants to put out this info to everyone. I did a few more searches and it was on a few other searches but not many.  It does help people doing ppc to see what their competition is actually doing.”

David Iwanow, co-author of O’Reilly’s Google Advertising Tools, commented, “The issue with any of this is that what is based on… is it local data, is it search data, is it ppc data, is it data from the beginning of time or just this month? The problem with any deployment like this is that it’s another black box that you have to try and explain to a client or deal with as an advertiser because you started a new campaign and people aren’t clicking on your ads because it shows you only have ever had 10 clicks…It’s another element that is going to potentially put advertisers in a box and make them weigh up the options of chasing a higher number again…. ie PageRank v3.”

There’s some interesting discussion going on about the feature in the WebmasterWorld forum. User “Tropical Island” writes:

I don’t know that I want my competitors knowing how many clicks I’ve been getting or how many I’ve paid for over the years.

I definitely think that it would encourage buyers to click on heavily clicked on ads. There is a reliability factor there as well.

LucidSW wonders if this could be some sort of extension to the +1 button. Google is using the +1 button on ads. While not the same as clicks, it would have a similar (perhaps not entirely the same) impact on ad clickability, one would think. If a large number of clicks are registered, some users might be more inclined to check it out for themselves.

LucidSW also makes the point that competitors knowing the number of clicks might be a “small price to pay” for getting more clicks.

In the thread, there is also a running theme that some users don’t understand that these ads are actually ads, and may assume that they’re regular search results, making the regular results appear less valuable, because they don’t display large numbers of clicks. Everybody in the thread so far seems to be in agreement on this, though personally, I have a hard time believing that this is the case for too many users, especially considering that they’re clearly marked with the word “ads.” Furthermore, the display in the new ads reads, “x clicks for this advertiser.”

O’Hare noted that he saw different things for the same keyword in Firefox and Chrome.

What do you think of the feature? Should Google make this widely available? Mandatory or optional? Tell us what you think.

“These new mobile local ad offerings build off of the momentum generated from the recent Bing Business Portal and Bing Mobile Deals announcements,” says Microsoft’s Dennis Glavin.

The Radius Targeting will let advertisers target a specific segment within a 5-100 mile radius of the address displayed in the ad copy.

The new attributes let advertisers define certain things in their ad, such as the merchant’s address or phone number. “Those attributes will be served to local queries and within advertisements, both on the PC and mobile,” says Glavin. “Local Ad Attributes will begin rolling out in adCenter in the second half of the calendar year, depending upon publisher and mobile device.”

“Bing Vision taps into the idea that once a customer is inside a store, the brand’s goal is to get them to ‘marry’ its product,” he says. “Bing Vision utilizes the camera on a customer’s smartphone to provide the customer with additional product information, reviews and prices. The system is easy: all a customer has to do is take a photo of the product and Bing Vision will detect the text, QR Scanner or MS Tag, returning the product results – helping the customer further engage and hopefully purchase the product.”

As far as scannable codes go, WebProNews recently spoke with Mike Wehrs, former Chief of the Mobile Marketing Association (and a Microsoft Vet), who now runs ScanBuy. He brought up some good point about using open formats vs. proprietary formats (like Microsoft’s Tag) Watch the interview:

Bing Vision is already available on the Bing iPhone app, and the company says it will be available on other platforms later this year.

Do you agree? Tell us what you think.

“Search-engine marketing (SEM) is the worst form of advertising,” he writes. “Sure, it’s able to get in front of the right audience, but who is really being persuaded by 130 characters of text split across four lines with no call to action? Giving SEM credit for being the form of advertising that drives billions of dollars in sales is like giving the checkout person at a supermarket credit for all the food sales annually. The checkout person does not persuade the shopper to buy Coke instead of Pepsi, and neither do text ads.”

“I’m not saying SEM lacks value,” he adds. “Placing your text listings in search engines, comparison shopping engines and other places users seek out does remind your customers: Oh, right, I remember them. They are who I was looking for.’ But, let’s be clear, SEM is only part of the equation, as it is not persuading users to chose you over your competitors.”

He goes on to discuss search retargeting with display ads, making some very valid points, based on the notion that search is indeed the “best form of targeting”.

We do know that SEO isn’t getting any easier.

There are certainly a lot more options for businesses to get in front of Internet users than there were when search advertising began to take off – namely social media marketing and direct advertising in social networks (Facebook).

Facebook of course has a very highly targeted approach to advertising, as it serves users ads based upon information from their profiles. Still, the ads have seen plenty of criticism over relevance. Of course it is still the advertiser that picks the categories they want to target.

Email marketing is still considered to be one of the most effective ways to reach customers and get them to convert. In fact, you might say email marketing is hotter than its been in years, with the rise of daily deal services like Groupon, Google Offers, etc. Let’s not forget that these services rely heavily on email.

Search has always been an attractive way to reach people, however, as you’re getting to the consumer right as they’re looking to buy, or at least researching a purchase. That’s why search will always be important (both SEO and Paid), even if consumers become less dependent on it for more online activities and information discovery.

SEO vs PPC is a classic debate. Which one is better? About a year and a half ago, we covered a session at Search Engine Strategies Chicago, where some top search experts discussed just that. Christine Churchill pointed to a study about conversion rates, finding that paid search came out ahead of SEO (just barely), but that it also came out ahead in average order value and average time on site. She also listed the following as advantages of search advertising:

- Gives immediate online presence
- Have a new site? Have ads in an hour
- Start getting ROI sooner
- No ramp up time
- Great for seasonal items or time sensitive promotions
- Great for testing
- Easily test effectiveness of new marketing message or site design change
- Quickly gather feedback
- Regulate traffic volume
- Sales pipeline empty? Use PPC to push traffic
- Overloaded? Pause campaigns or cut back spend
- Have limited sales season? Saturate market while demand is high

I’ll add another advantage. Paid search ads are not subject to Google’s algorithm, which changes daily – sometimes very drastically (see Panda update).

There is plenty of change in the search advertising landscape as well. Google is frequently making adjustments to ads. Just this week, they launched instant previews on ads (which could actually save you money).

We asked our Facebook fans if they think search advertising is the best form of advertising or the worst. The majority of responses said “best”. Join the conversation below.

WebProNewsDo you think search is the best or worst form of advertising? 17 hours ago · Like · 10 comments

Do you think search advertising is the worst form of advertising? Share your thoughts.