New Tools for MSN adCenter Users

Microsoft’s Internet advertising Platform, The MSN adCenter is now adding new and advanced tools to help advertisers become more efficient in dealing with their PPC (Pay Per Click) ad campaigns. Among the new introductions, the first is the “adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007” intended to enhance advertiser’s knowledge about their customer base. The next is “adexcellence program” aimed at providing opportunity to become certified adCenter expert.

The adcenter Add-in for excel 2007 lets users conduct Keyword research and formulate keyword strategy from within an Excel spreadsheet, using attributes like historical cost information, relevance and projected volume. With this tool advertisers will get to know keyword popularity and trends, and can gain insight on demographic and localization information of actual queries.

The Microsoft “adExcellence” program offers the advantage of becoming a certified adCenter expert. It includes more than 20 free training modules. An advertising agency or individual have to appear an annual fee-based examination at less than $100 for a year to earn the MSN adExcellence certification. This program is similar to the “Google Advertising Professionals” or the “Yahoo Ambassador program” operating by Google and Yahoo.

Yahoo PPC goes for shorter Ads

In its effort to streamline the search results and to make it easier for users to read and absorb your ad messages, Yahoo announces its plan to limit ads length at 75 characters. Till date Yahoo has been offering two options for its advertisers, a short description and a longer one. But they have started cutting off ads now. Though you are allowed to enter the longer version of descriptions, your ads will be adjusted and displayed within the 75 character limit.

AdWords adding more values to advertisers’ campaigns

It seems that Google AdWords has taken the promise of empowering its advertisers like never before. The world’s most powerful and popular PPC (pay per click) advertising program is continuously adding new features in its interface, making it better and better with every passing day.

The most important of all among the recent introductions is “IP Exclusion”. This tool allows you to eliminate certain people (people who are possible click fraud threats and whose IP addresses you know) from viewing your ads, by blocking their IP addresses. The tool offers you the option of selecting up to 20 IP addresses that you think should be blocked. You can cut click fraud activities to a reasonable extent by this way.

Next in the row is “Placement Performance Report”. This new feature is a great way to efficiently analyze your ads performance in Google’s content network. You can compare specific sites behavior –like the no. of clicks specific sites’ provides, conversions rates, etc. and etc. and can take effective actions.

The latest of all is Google MDS (Manager Defined Spend). It’s specifically for those advertisers, who run multiple accounts in AdWords. MDS is the new substitute of MCC (MY Client Center) only but unlike the regular MCC, MDS will allow the advertiser to create, modify & apply budgets without the need for a separate Service Agreement for each account.

Good news for Yahoo Advertisers

It’s been a long time that Yahoo PPC advertisers were under the cloud of fraudulent clicks. But the good news is that the site is now launching a series of quality tools to minimize the click fraud worries for its advertisers.

The latest tool in this line is “Blocked Domains”. It allows you to specify sites (that come under Yahoo Advertising Network) where you don’t want your ads to be displayed. With the help of this tool you can restrict your ads display, allowing them to appear only on sites that you think will add value to your campaign.

“Pricing Discount” is another effective initiative from Yahoo to provide you quality traffic. This tool evaluates the value of a click coming from a partner site. If it finds the quality of the click is not up to the mark it automatically discounts the pricing on that click.

Conversion Optimizer: Google’s new AdWords feature

Google AdWords advertisers with a minimum of 300 conversions in the last 30 days now can manage their AdWord campaigns with the new AdWord Conversion Optimizer tool. This latest addition to AdWords feature is a strong effort on part of Google to help advertisers meet their ROI objectives easily with minimum conversion costs.

The Conversion Optimizer is based on the CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) factor. An advertiser just need to specify the maximum CPA bid for his campaigns and the tool will automatically generate optimized CPC (Cost Per Click) bid for each auction by analyzing historical data of your campaign. The best part of it is –Advertisers no longer have to manually adjust bids to reach CPA goals.

Google’s new interactive ad experience

In its never ending quest for a new and better customer experience, Google recently came out with another exciting ad form “Google Gadget Ads”. An interactive, rich media ad format that enables advertisers to target traffic flexibly and in time via regular updates within the ad unit.

Unlike AdWords and other static online ad forms, the new Gadget Ad tool allows users to engage with real-time effects. One can go through a collection of images, videos and many other rich media contents all in a single ad format.

Gadget Ads will be operating in the existing Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Impression (CPM) advertising models and will appear in conjunction with the existing text, image and video ads on Google Content Network.

Google expands scope for mobile website publishers, advertisers

The recent launch of Google AdSense Program for mobile has enhanced the money making opportunity for mobile website publishers. Now those with a website optimized for mobile browsers can participate in Google’s AdSense program and earn money via contextual advertising.

Google’s AdSense Program is intended to contextually targets ads to mobile website contents. It will automatically check the contents of participating “mobile websites” and deliver text ads relevant to the websites’ contents. Whenever a mobile user clicks on the ads the publisher of that particular website will be paid.

Moreover, for the online advertisers Google’s latest Program opens a new platform for quick and efficient promotion of products and services anytime and anywhere.

Lead Exchange: The next generation online marketing tool

Lead Exchange has been sighted as the most potential online marketing concept soon to challenge the CPM (Cost Per 1000 Impression) and PPC (Pay Per Click) systems as reported by the news site Dm News

Lead Exchange is an online tool that allows both advertiser and publisher to take on less risk and maximize mutual benefits.

In CPM you pay the publisher a fixed amount for every 1000 impressions on the ad in the hope that someone notices it, while in PPC you chance upon potential clients paying for every click that occurred. But in Lead Exchange the publisher captures the lead first and then sells it to the highest bidders. The advertiser has the advantage to go and pay only for the exact type of lead, which has already been captured.

Things like quality control level and price elasticity are some of the unique advantages that advertisers can experience in lead exchange. According to Interactive Advertising Bureau online lead generation is growing faster than any other online advertising forms. It would be interesting to see what better results it can bring for the advertisers in coming days.

Google introduces new tool to fight Click Fraud

In its crusade against click fraud, Google came up with a new Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center to facilitate advertisers with click fraud information under one single roof. This Click Fraud tool is the latest of its kinds that has been made available by Google.

Click fraud is considered as a potential threat to both the advertisers and PPC engines. While innocent advertisers were robbed of huge advertising sums, the PPC engines have to face loss in revenue as well as advertiser’s faith.

In most cases click fraud occurs when a competitor firm/ company clicks on your ads with the intention to drive up your ad spends. Moreover, click fraud is also a common practice among greedy web publishers who click on their sites’ ads to increase commissions.

Advertisers to have more control over ad positions in Google

In an attempt to increase advertisers control over ad positions Google announced its changing of Ad Placement Algorithm that will consider an ad’s maximum cost-per-click (CPC) instead of the actual CPC as a factor.

Till now the actual CPC is the factor in determining ad placement. Actual CTC is calculated, in part, by the bidding behavior of the advertisers whose ads positioned below yours. As such the chances of your ad being promoted to the top could be constrained by a factor you cannot influence. But in maximum CPC it is you who determine and set values for your ads and thus it increase your control over top ad placement.

The new improved formula is also programmed to increase the quality of top ads for users, in addition to increasing control for advertisers.

Online Marketing: How to work it out in your favor?

Online marketing offers you the advantages of targeting markets widely and instantly. There is no need to go and meet people to have leads as is the case with regular marketing. With online marketing your business can access millions of potential customers in just a few clicks. So if you have a website, which is good and running; think you are right on the threshold of transforming it into an ultimate profit making tool.

There are many approaches available to guide the marketers and business owners as to how to have the maximum advantages in online marketing. But before you go for it, I would like to hint on the fact that a successful strategy that works great for one may not necessarily do the same with the other. So it is very important to decide whether or which online promotional activity is right for your business at the outset.

The type of customers you want to reach and the kind of options you choose best in online marketing differ from business to business. Again some are interested only in promotional activities while others want both promotion and selling of their products and services online. It’s by analyzing all these factors that you can hit the right online marketing approach, thus taking your business to significant heights.

Top 2 PPC Players

Google AdWords: Google AdWords is the most popular and widely used PPC program available in the World Wide Web. It offers a wide range of features and facilities to control, managed and run your ad campaign or campaigns. AdWords offers two kinds of accounts for advertisers-STARTER and STANDARD editions. The Starter edition is simple and easy to operate and maintain with lesser features and is allowed to operate for a single market (country/territory). For those new to Google AdWords, Starter edition offers an excellent means to display and run their ads that are based on single products for a group of specific customers. The Standard edition on the other hand is a full-featured AdWords version with advanced features on tracking and managing multiple campaigns for a wide choice of markets across the globe. The best thing about an AdWords campaign is that it can generate maximum traffics like no other of its kind can give.

Yahoo Sponsored Search: Yahoo Sponsored Search or Yahoo PPC program is another great way to display and market your products and services to a large audience in the Net. The Yahoo owned and run PPC engine was earlier the property of Goto.com- the frontrunner of all PPC engines. Yahoo PPC comes with advance features and facilities and provides you with the best PPC campaign tracking and managing tools. Opening an account in Yahoo is easy. You just need to follow the 5 simple, well-defined steps in the yahoo Search Marketing sign up page.

Keywords complexities in PPC Campaign

A successful PPC campaign is not only about choosing the right keywords that are popular and relevant to your ad materials. You should also have to keep an eye on the bidding rates of each keyword within your PPC Ad-groups. Depending on your ad budget you will assigned only those keywords that best describe your ads’ and can generate real clicks. Since campaigners are jumping into the PPC fray in overwhelming numbers, bidding wars really get tougher now. The best keywords are expensive, while affordable alternatives, more specific ones, with better ad positions may bring lesser or sometimes no attention at all. Worst still, the fear of finding bid rates of keywords of an on going campaign jumps into all time high the very next morning. As a result your position drops deep down in search pages, forcing you to find substitute words to regain position.

This has brought the urgency for campaigners to spend more and more time in identifying and analyzing their keywords along with the respective bid rates. Professional PPC service providers have their strategies and tools, but those who run their campaign by their own without professional help need to be very careful. It is easy to open a campaign in your favorite PPC engine but not that simple to run the same with keywords that meet your ads’ demand and budget at the same time.

softsol: Some Tips on Pay Per Click Advertising

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Some Tips on Pay Per Click Advertising

PPC or Pay Per Click Ad has brought a revolutionary change in online marketing today. What had been conceived as a viable means to help websites improve search ranking on keywords is now a fast growing online advertising tool that accrues sales in volumes over a wide selection of markets across the continents. The best thing about PPC is that you can target your market anywhere in the world easily and earned potential hits from customers in no time.

But before jumping into a PPC Ad Campaign it is always important to spend some time learning about the particular PPC engine you are into. It is true that all PPC engines work towards the same goal, but each has unique approaches and unique results. For some while one brings better conversions the other offers more traffic and so on.

Moreover, with so much of lucrative offerings in this paid search arena, there is also the risk of losing a good chunk of ad spends through mistakes. The keywords you choose and bidding strategies you apply are the most vital factors in determining the success of your PPC campaign. Beside, one should be very clear about his targeted markets, should be careful in selecting his keywords; have to create appealing ad copies and powerful landing pages that convert browsers into customers. Once you are through with your campaign you have to keep track of its various performances at regular intervals, testing ad copies and landing pages for optimum results.

To conclude a carefully run and managed PPC Campaign can bring overwhelming feedbacks to your business in lesser time. You will be spending a small fraction of your budget against the enormous gains. So, if you have a good website at hand and competitive products and services to offer, why not make it a highly productive affair with PPC. In case you plan to make it in a big way, and if you don’t have enough time and labor to spare, it is advisable to approach a professional PPC service provider.

softsol: Contextual or Target Specific Ads: The new age marketing tool

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Contextual or Target Specific Ads: The new age marketing tool

The Internet has given us the ultimate power to lead life with easy, speed and in volumes. With Internet at hand we only required to identify and grasp the many opportunities it provides. One of the key offerings of Internet is Online Ads that enable you to promote your products and services to a large group audience across the globe.

Of the latest of online ad promotion system that hits businesses today is Contextual or Target Specific Ads. A fast growing online marketing concept that combines both creative and technical aspects of the Internet, enabling brands to have their audience and websites their revenues.

Contextual or Keyword specific ad is becoming an integral part of marketing campaign for businesses, differing in size and industry. Companies are spending in billions to rope in their target customers through this online ad system based on selected keywords. Google AdSense is one of the most popular contextual advertisement systems where sponsored links appear on web pages that carry similar contents. The ads will be highlighted either in the form of pop-up ads or through ads place on the pages.

However, the ultimate profit in online ads is that while our ads should be appealing we should also have a website with contents that will generate more hits and convert browsers into customers.