Microsoft announced the launch of a new version of its Campaign Planner tool for the holidays. The tool, which was first released in September, has new features for vertical and product trends, keyword research and competitive insights.

“Campaign Planner’s search volume research tool can be used broadly to pull general vertical or product trends,” explains Microsoft’s Chan Liu. “The left hand navigation puts you in the driver’s seat, giving you the capability to drill down and browse pre-defined verticals and sub-verticals that may be relevant to your business. Electing a vertical pulls up a default trending line graph, giving a quick snapshot into seasonality, and also provides performance numbers of the last seven days. Included is an actual number for search volume – the total number of times the list of related keywords was searched in the last seven days! The tool also offers a current view of device breakout, and advertising benchmarks including average CPC. Understanding the device mix should be a consideration when making website decisions or optimizing landing pages across devices.”

“Want more insight into the top products being searched within a vertical? Click on the ‘Products’ tab,” adds Liu. “This view displays search volume by popular products. This information shows the volume differences between similar products in the vertical, and can help guide key business decisions. Define focus areas, review campaign budgets and expand keywords based on current consumer search trends and behavior.”

With the keyword research feature, you can just type the keyword into the search box, and get recent performance and trends. The view can be modified by daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. There are also options for “Search volume by location” and “Performance by Device”.

The competitive insight feature gives you info on top advertisers bidding in a vertical or across a selected product. You can see up to 20 top domains, their ad coverage and average position on the Bing search results page.

Microsoft goes into more detail about all of this here.

Image via Microsoft