Ironvine Search Marketing

ChannelAdvisor Lays off 19% of its Workforce

Sad to say, I was one of them. Apparently there were 32 Employees let go in the US offices.

http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y09/m01/i23/s04
http://onlinesaleschannels.wordpress.com/2009/01/22/my-liquid-lunch-with-ex-ca-employees/

I look at this as a good thing though as I was the only member of the Seattle office left on staff after they vacated the office building in Oct 2008. (Yes, no more west coast office). I have had to work out of my home office since then. It will be nice to be able to get back into traveling to work and getting to talk to other people, sharing and learning new things.

If anyone knows a company looking for a Search Marketing guru feel free to contact me at steve @ ironvine.com!

My condolences to all the other employees that were let go this week I wish you all the best, and to my former co-workers it was a great 2 years. Take care!

Steven Terjeson of ChannelAdvisor is accredited as an official Microsoft adExcellence Member. A Microsoft adExcellence Member has completed comprehensive online training on managing Microsoft adCenter search engine marketing campaigns and has demonstrated expert knowledge by passing the Microsoft adExcellence accreditation exam.

This completes my suite of certifications, Google, Yahoo and now MSN.

Technorati Tags: adExcellence, Certification, SEM, adCenter, ChannelAdvisor, Ironvine

Yahoo board formally rejects Microsoft’s $45 billion bid, saying it ’substantially undervalues’ the company.

Microsoft responds to Yahoo. Says rejection of $45B bid is ‘unfortunate’ and that it’s ‘offering shareholders superior value.’

Read more about the battle at fortune.cnn.com

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Yahoo, Takeover, Ironvine

Reach on-the-go consumers. Away from the computer, tech enthusiasts continue to look to their phones to stay connected with the latest news and information from MSN Mobile. Target over 9.6 million people consuming over 58 million page views each month on MSN Mobile.1 Align your message with premium content. Align your marketing message where people are accessing premium content including Fox Sports, MSNBC News, MSN Money, MSN Entertainment, and MSN Weather. Optimize your media mix with MSN Mobile. Leverage a variety of display graphical ads to deliver relevant, interactive mobile content such as wallpaper, themes, ringtones, sweepstakes, product alerts and applications. To learn more about advertising on MSN Mobile please go to http://advertising.microsoft.com/Mobile.

Technorati Tags: MSN, Mobile, Marketing, PPC, SEM, Search, Ironvine

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Here are some tips from the MSN adCenter blog about using ‘Brand’ in your ad copy. I thought they were worth making note of, especially as we move into Q4 holiday sales season.

The Power of Brand Names

The creation of a strong brand identity is important to every company, large and small, all around the World. Brands built with care can say a multitude of things in just one word such as: hip, secure, quality, trendy, established, reliable, cutting edge, energetic, leadership and trustworthy. Advertisers go to great lengths to strengthen and protect their brand identity through traditional advertising mediums. We believe that it is just as important for this to extend to paid search advertising. Please read on to find out why.

Live Search and Brand Popularity

Approximately 35% of the top searches in the UK, USA and France are brand related, which gives you an idea just how brand focused our Live Search users are. If your brand is strong (and strong brands come in all shapes and sizes) include it in at least in one of your ad titles and try to get it in the descriptions too! We have often seen click through rates (CTRs) increase when brand names have been included effectively.

Smart Use of Space & a Great USP!

One might argue that space is at a premium in the world of search advertising ad copy but if your brand is strong, it will say more than a thousand words! Strong brands can also be a very powerful unique selling point as some users may prefer to buy or use a trusted source instead of a unknown one.

The use of ‘Official Site’

Using ‘Official Site’ in your ad title (when appropriate) will further help you to stand out from the crowd. This works best when you own a big brand, are selling a unique product or when you are dealing with multiple affiliates. A good example of this is the vacuum cleaner manufacturer, Dyson, who offer their products directly to the consumer as well as through resellers. They could incorporate ‘official site’ in their ad text to attract customers that need more information about Dyson in general, or who feel more confident buying directly from the manufacturer.

Technorati Tags: MSN, adCenter, PPC, Search, Paid, Marketing, SEM, Ironvine

For those of you who were wondering where Microsoft’s mobile search service would end up, here is one place.

Sprint Nextel Corp. on Tuesday began offering an enhanced search service through Microsoft Corp. that allows its phone users to find nearby businesses through the phones’ built-in location-based technology.

Typing in a term, such as “pizza,” delivers a list of links, including nearby pizza shops, even without a zip code or other address information. Selecting a link pulls up a map to the location and allows the user to call the shop’s phone number.

The process could be simplified further through the voice-recognition software also being offered Tuesday for download on certain Sprint phones. It uses technology picked up in Microsoft’s acquisition earlier this year of Tellme Networks Inc.

In that case, users just say “pizza” and the search engine does its work.

You can read the full article here:

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/apwire/D8RO3D302.htm

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, adCenter, Mobile Search, MSN, PPC, Paid Search, Online Marketing, Ironvine

Last Friday MSN adCenter updated their interface to include several new features including faster editorial reviews, a hew home page dashboard, and faster ways to copy and edit keywords and create campaigns. You can review the update notice below.

Microsoft adCenter will upgrade on Friday, September 7. The tools and functionality in this upgrade will include significant improvements in editorial efficiency, campaign creation, and campaign management.

During this upgrade, adCenter will be temporarily unavailable for up to 8 hours on Friday, starting at 6:00 P.M. Pacific Time. Your ads and keywords will remain live and continue to run as usual, during this time.

After this upgrade, reporting will be delayed for up to 72 hours. To see when your data was last updated, check the timestamp on the bottom of adCenter Reporting tab.

Upgrade highlights:
Save time with fast and thorough editorial reviews for new ad groups.
Create campaigns with ease by quickly importing campaigns directly from other paid search programs or by copying existing ad groups within adCenter to a new campaign.
Instantly navigate to specific accounts, campaigns, or ad groups with the new adCenter home page dashboard, a one-stop-shop for all of your daily campaign management tasks.
Update keyword bids in bulk and view keyword performance on the same page.
Visualize your campaigns’ targeting settings with Microsoft Virtual EarthTM map integration for geographical targeting.
For details on how to use these adCenter improvements view the Feature Release Guide. In addition, the adCenter Blog will highlight detailed feature reviews after the upgrade occurs.

If you have any questions, please contact our adCenter Support Team.

Sincerely,

The Microsoft adCenter Team

Technorati Tags: MSN, Microsoft, adCenter, PPC, Paid Search, Online Marketing, Ironvine

SES was a pretty good conference. The event hall was pretty well staffed with vendors including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, iProspect, and many more. There were lots of Search companies, link building companies, and various other web companies.

My conference was highlighted by the Google invite only Agency Lunch and the Google Dance at the Google Campus in Mountain View.

The Google Lunch was a small group of invite only agency people. I sat at a table with the CEO and a few other people from advertising.com. The presentation was basically all about the new Google offerings in addition to search, Print, TV, Radio, etc. Print as well possibly. I’m sure some of our clients already do radio ads and could be pretty easy to migrate over. The nice thing is that Google offers ways to track the performance, like dedicated phone numbers which they offer for free or by using dedicated trackable entry points.

Google Dance 2007 was a huge bash at the Google campus in Mountain Home.
You can see more pics from Google on picasa: http://picasaweb.google.com/gdance2007/GoogleDance2007WeRockedIt
There were lots of product demos on all the Google applications, Meet the Developers, food, drinks, a huge dance party in the rec hall, green screen karaoke, and my favorite the Candy Bar.

All in all it was a great trip. Met lots of people in the event hall and the sessions had some decent information. Next time I hope to get into some of the other sessions to see what they are about.

Technorati Tags: SES, San Jose, Search Engine Stratagies, Search, Paid Search, Marketing, Advertising, Ironvine, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo

This weekend MSN AdCenter had a 27 hour downtime. As a result the reporting data is delayed by several days.

“AdCenter Reporting: As a result of the upgrade, adCenter reporting data will be delayed through May 1. Note that reports pulled before April 28 will be complete. Please re-run all reports for data between April 28 and May 1 on or after May 2. For partners in the UK and France, please pull data on or after May 3.”

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, MSN, AdCenter, PPC, Paid Search, Search Marketing

Following in the footsteps of Google, then Yahoo, MSN has decided to implement Quality Based Ranking for adCenter.

Now that they have been online for a while and have a relatively usable client base they are able to actually have some basis to judge ads against each other with a little history behind them. In my estimation this is a better way to handle the quality score than what Yahoo did with Panama just letting them all start out shooting against each other with no real historical data to go on. Google just flowed it into the system without anyone really seeing much difference (like most things they do with us blinded).

adCenter Quality-Based Ranking

On the 16th April we improved how we establish the quality and relevance of ads and landing pages in relation to the search user’s likely intent. This improvement will ensure that we maintain a high quality of ads and relevance to the Live Search user and is not a radical change, but an enhancement to our existing guidelines around relevance and quality. To ensure that we are delivering maximum benefit to the search user, we are doing the following:

• Assessing the content of the ad and landing page in relation to the user’s likely intent.

• Assessing the keywords that an advertiser selects in relation to the advertiser’s landing page content, to confirm that they are substantially relevant to both the landing page and the user’s search query.

• Trying to ensure that there is substantive content on the landing page to fulfill the user’s query.

• Assessing the duplicative nature of content in overall search results. In cases where there may be content that is duplicated within search results (including landing pages) Microsoft reserves the right to limit advertising of the duplicate content when it lessens the user experience.

In addition to this blog post, to ensure that our advertisers are aware of this upcoming change, we have contacted customers who we think may be affected by this update. However, even if you have not been contacted, we recommend using the following resources to ensure that ads you submit in the future are of the highest quality.

Resources:

• adCenter Editorial Best Practices

• adCenter Ad Ranking Best Practices

Technorati Tags: MSN, adCenter, Microsoft, advertising, marketing, paid search, online marketing, Ironvine

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Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Office, Live, Free, Web Hosting, Ironvine

Microsoft is rolling out its new content ad pilot program to adCenter advertisers. Some advertisers maybe be automatically upgraded to the new program which is similar to Yahoo’s Publisher Network or Google’s AdSense programs.

Microsoft is touting that they have an audience of over 96 million unique visitors a month and 81% of whom purchased online in the last 6 months (based on Jan 2006 figures???). Honestly this seems pretty high to me.

Included in the new pilot program are also all the new beta features of the adCenter beta site. These features include the ability to import other online advertising campaigns, make bulk updates to keywords, perform full text search, and save favorites, all of which are huge upgrades to the adCenter system (which is lacking in management ability to say the least).

The main thing to watch for is the email letting you know that your account has been upgraded (sent to account managers when the change happens). At this point you need to decide if you want to turn content ads off (I would recommend this if you have a budget) or create separate content-only/search-only ad groups. Not sure I understand how they apply this since you can only use a keyword once per campaign…

The other big thing to note is that content bids are the same as search bids by default. Please go in and change the content bids lower than your search bids unless you are after something specific. You can set both search and content bids for your ad groups.

You can read the official release on the adCenter blog.

Technorati Tags: MSN, Microsoft, adCenter, Microsoft adCenter, PPC, Paid Search, Search MArketing, Managed Search, Contextual, Content Ads, Content, Ironvine