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March 17 The adCenter Blog has moved!We're pleased to announce the launch of our new adCenter Community site - www.adcentercommunity.com. Please come see us in our new home and take a moment to update your RSS subscription to our new location, and also come visit us in our discussion forum to ask and answer questions, and share your adCenter experiences and feedback. We've moved our blog and forums to www.adcentercommunity.com in order to consolidate our community offerings into one place to make it easier to find the info you need - here's more context from our launch email: The Future of adCenter Community is Here! www.adCenterCommunity.com The adCenter Community Team is ready to unveil the next evolution of advertiser enablement with the launch of www.adCenterCommunity.com!! In order to contribute to our credo of delivering world class service, we have been working diligently to deliver an online experience that enables our advertisers through a variety of interactive communication channels. Some of these features include: · Product/Service specific blogs · Categorized User Forums · Multimedia Distribution including video interviews, audio podcasts and training videos · User profiles So whether you're an adCenter Advertiser, using adCenter Analytics or developing through the adCenter API, www.adCenterCommunity.com will be the one place to visit for all adCenter updates, news, tips, tricks and best practices. We've tried to build a community portal that encourages interaction so that not only can you get information, updates and assistance from Microsoft employees, but also from each other, as some of the most knowledgeable users of our products and services are our customers! Be sure to check out our user forums as they grow into a robust resource on everything adCenter and more. We're excited about delivering a truly unique experience for our advertisers, and hope you find value in the resource as well. As always, feel free to share your feedback and suggestions as we are always looking to improve. Enjoy! Jeanie, Carolyn, Jason, Chris & Mel – adCenter Community Team March 13 Heads-up: the adCenter Blog is movingJust wanted to give everyone a quick heads-up that this blog will be moving to a new location next week, so please keep your eye out -- we'll post the new URL here so you can come check it out and let us know what you think.
We'll keep you posted... Thanks,
Carolyn, adCenter Community Team Microsoft adLab Tools Review Part 2 – Keywords & ContentAs discussed in an introduction post, Microsoft adLab showcases some of the innovative tools and technologies our researchers are helping to build, providing advertisers and publishers with the very best ways to connect with consumers. Today, I’ll single out just two from the Keywords & Content category on the adLab website. The new Entity Analysis tool includes data for both the English and French language. Simply put the algorithm breaks down complex user queries into separate entities making it easier for the delivery engine to serve the most relevant ad. These examples give you an idea how a query can be broken out into separate words or phrases that make an entity. Applied to adCenter, this should mean an ad for a house builder that specialises in installing “gates” would no longer phrase match to “Bill Gates”, meaning a more relevant set of results on the search page, and a potential increase in click-through rate for the advertiser. The Detecting Commercial Intention tool is a favourite of mine, as it helps determine whether a user’s query is meant to result in a sale or transaction of some sort, or whether they are simply looking for information or gathering data to inform an action at a later stage in the buying cycle. Results for the American football team “seattle seahawks” show a low commercial query probability as it’s most likely the user is looking for information on the team, maybe the latest scores or line up, but they’re certainly not looking to purchase anything.....yet. Conversely the commercial intent of “seattle seahawks shirt” is high as it’s product-orientated and the user is obviously looking for shirts related to the team. This tool is very useful for determining the kind of ad copy you could write for these two very different queries. For “seattle seahawks” you might write copy that is somewhat informational – “Find the latest team news and scores and check out our online merchandise store.” With this copy are catering for the information-gathering nature of the query, but also letting the user know there is a store on your site should they be looking to purchase souvenirs too. The “seattle seahawks shirt” ad copy should be more of a commercial nature – “Buy Seattle Seahawks shirts in all sizes securely online. Free shipping!” The users is obviously looking to buy a shirt, so make sure your ad tells them what and how they can purchase one from you. For more on how to write great ad copy, check out our Creative Services Team’s archive of posts here: Ad Copy Best Practice Next time we’ll look at some of adLab’s forecasting tools. Cheers Mel – adCenter Community team March 11 adCenter Analytics - How To Run Basic Traffic History ReportsLast week we talked about Getting Started With adCenter Analytics and implementing analytics tags on your website. Today, we'll show you how to run some simple reports to track how many visitors you have had to your site, and how many pages they viewed. When you log into adCenter, click on the Analytics Tab, and then Profiles and you will see the list of sites you have created profiles for. A green status light means the tool has been collecting data and you are now ready to view some reports. Click on View under Reports for the Profile you want to see data for. Depending on how long data has been collecting for, you will see a screen that looks a bit like this: On the left hand side find the Reports Menu. Click on Traffic & History and two options will appear.
“Visitors” is the number of unique users that have been accessing your site and viewing content over any given amount of time. “Page Views” are the total amount of pages that were viewed by those visitors. The number of page views is very often larger than the visitor total, as a user may look at more than one page of your site while browsing it. A quick way to see how many visitors have been to your site in February would be to hover your mouse over the February segment of data. A tiny pop-up will appear with that month's visitor statistics. In this case the site received 1501 unique visitors in February. In order to see how many pages those visitors perused, click on the Page Views option in the Traffic & History menu. You can get a quick view of data by hovering your mouse over the week or an actual day too. To get a detailed breakdown of your traffic for a given month, week or day, simply click on the data segment and it will highlight in orange. Below, you will see a graph showing the detailed traffic for that given time selection including Visits, Page Views & Bounce Rate. Bounce Rate is defined as the percentage of your visitors that viewed just a single page of your site when they arrived. They may have perused the first page on which they landed but did not explore the site further. A high Bounce Rate might be OK for a blog, as readers may only arrive to read a single post. But if your site is selling products or services, you'd want users to spend some time navigating your site, so a high Bounce Rate may be a signal that you need to investigate further. We’ll talk about analysing reasons for Bounce Rates, and how to take action in more detail in a later blog post. The final way you can run a basic Visitor or Page View report is by clicking on Select A Custom Date Range. This functionality enables you to see data for any given number of days, weeks or months. You may want to see your site's traffic for just a three week or six day period. This lets you click on your desired start and end time values and see how much traffic you have received during that date range. Do check back next week when we'll be delving into some other reports in a little more detail. Cheers Mel - adCenter Community Team March 10 Search Engine Strategies New YorkThe Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference is next week in New York, NY. There will be Microsoft folks speaking at a couple of the sessions, so stop by and see us... Wednesday, March 19th: 5:30-6:45pm - Searcher Behavior Research Update
Thursday, March 20th: 12:45-1:45pm - Meet the Crawlers
Also check out our sponsored session, Tues. March 18 from 3:15 - 4:30: Microsoft Search | Tips and tricks for delivering great results and campaigns with Live Search Speakers:
Hope to see you there! Carolyn, adCenter Community Team
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