Microsoft adCenter Content Ads Pilot
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.
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