Microsoft wrote several blog posts to explain all the changes:

• Campaign Management Updates covers the new targeting options, new bidding flexibility, and improved keyword research tools
• Account Management Updates covers sign-in changes, the new home page and alerts, and a new settings page
• adCenter Desktop (Beta) Updates covers improved performance and functionality in the adCenter Desktop beta
• Content Ads Updates (U.S. Only) announces that the Microsoft Content Ads is now out of beta and details a few new features

Prior, Digg used Google AdSense ads to monetize the site. Then Digg dropped Google for Microsoft ads and now, it appears Digg will sell ads directly, and continue to use Microsoft ads for open inventory. The Digg/Microsoft partnership was suppose to last until the summer 2010. Bring the ad management in house will allow Digg to explore more revenue models and create custom ads, that are outside of the IAB standards.

• Campaign Management: ability to pause and resume ads and keywords, geo-targeting enhancements, and improved performance reporting on the Ads page
• Editorial Improvements: faster reviews, dynamic feedback about why ads and keywords were disapproved, and inline notification when dynamic text causes your ads to exceed character limits
• User Management: if previously you were only able to have one user, now you can create multiple account users
• Content Ads (U.S. only): get keyword bid suggestions and performance estimates for your content ads

Here is a breakdown of all the blog posts I found pertaining to this fall upgrade:

• adCenter Fall Upgrade: New Features, adCenter Blog for Advertisers Blog
• adCenter API Production Fall Upgrade Now Live, adCenter API Blog for Developers
• adCenter Fall Upgrade: Campaign Management Updates, adCenter Blog for Advertisers
• adCenter Fall Upgrade: Content Ads Updates (U.S. only), adCenter Blog for Advertisers
• adCenter Fall Upgrade: Editorial Updates, adCenter Blog for Advertisers
• adCenter Fall Upgrade: User Management Updates, adCenter Blog for Advertisers
• adCenter Analytics Beta Refresh – Check Out The New Features, adCenter Analytics Blog
• adCenter API Production Upgrade Now Live, adCenter API Blog for Developers

The initial implementation of Live Search is understated, to say the least. The Facebook search box gives no immediate indication of its new capabilities:

It’s not until you begin typing in the search box that a “Search the Web” option appears:

And after completing a search, “Web” is one of the tabs that appear above search results:

Finally, if you click the “Web” tab, in the upper right above the search results is a link to perform the same search on Live.com:

(Strangely, in the case of a search for my name, at least, the search results on Live.com are different than what shows up from Live.com under the “Web” tab on Facebook.)

On the Live Search Blog, Microsoft’s Angus Norton says they’ll rely on user feedback to “explore additional ways to integrate Live Search more deeply into the Facebook experience.” Facebook’s blog post announcement calls this a “first step,” and also promises more web integration in the future: “…we’re working on a number of other new ways to leverage all the web has to offer.”

The addition of Live Search on the Facebook platform helps Microsoft catch up with both Google and Yahoo. Google provides the web search and text-based ads on MySpace. Yahoo provides search, content (Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Music), and advertising on Bebo.

More on Techmeme.

Content Ads is still a very exclusive and limited beta test. Google AdSense is widely used by publishers. Yahoo’s Publisher Network follows but is still also in beta and is only accepting US publishers (even after three years in beta), while Microsoft’s Content Ads has been accepting on a very limited basis.

Microsoft told TechCrunch that they intend on expanding their “high quality network and relevant audience gradually and intelligently over time for our advertisers.” Microsoft also hopes to “evaluate customer interest and product performance as we move through the private pilot, but we have no specific launch plans to announce at this time.”

There is no current estimated time for when a full release will be made of the Content Ads program, but I do know many publishers are eager to give it a test run.

Postscript: Microsoft posted a clarification, basically saying the same thing I said above:

Microsoft’s self-serve advertising offering for publishers is still under development and is currently in a private pilot phase, being tested by select publishers who met the participation requirements. The private pilot phase began earlier this year. A private, phased approach allows us to learn more about customer interest in content advertising and provide guidance as to how we can improve the product and deliver the right features required to meet publisher and advertiser needs. It’s our intention to continue to expand our high quality network and relevant audience gradually and intelligently over time for our advertisers. We will evaluate customer interest and product performance as we move through the private pilot, but we have no specific launch plans to announce at this time.

News from the search engines

Google AdWords: As reported in my last column, landing page load time will soon be incorporated into Quality Score. From Google’s March blog post, their response to “Why are we doing this?” was: “Two reasons: first, users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.”

The post goes on to state, “In the next few weeks, we will add load time evaluations to the Keyword Analysis page (we’ll notify you when they are available). You will then have one month to review your site and make necessary adjustments.”

After the one month review period, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.”

The landing page parameter has already been added to our accounts here at Fuor Digital. Go to the keyword level in your account and click the magnifying glass to bring up the dialog box. From there, you can click to the Keyword Analysis page via the Details and Recommendations links for more information, including keyword relevance and landing page load time ratings.

Yahoo Panama: Yahoo has posted new additions to its editorial policy regarding categories of unacceptable content. These include:

• Cigarettes

• Essay-Writing Services
• Fake IDs and Fake Diplomas
• Firearms, Ammunition, and Fireworks

Yahoo also added some new guidelines about acceptable landing pages. These are good changes in my view, as they prohibit pages that change browser preferences, promote bulk marketing, or try to spam the engines. You can read the full post here.

MSN adCenter: Check out the recent Online adCenter Support Community site that was launched this year if you have any questions or concerns with your account. It’s split up by topic for advertisers, API developers, and analytics users. Not only are there posts from Microsoft employees, but there are also forums for users like you to post questions, read answers, and interact with the overall adCenter community. The site is relatively bare at the moment, but I’m sure it will become a very good spot for learning about the products. I’m surprised Google hasn’t launched something similar yet.

In depth: Two essential tools: Google demographic bidding and MSN content

Google demographic bidding

From the Inside AdWords Blog: “What is demographic bidding? It’s a feature that helps you target your ads to users of a particular age group (such as ages 18-24), by gender, or to combinations of those groups. You can use demographic bidding whether you are using contextual or placement targeting and with both CPC and CPM bidding. You can refine your reach based on users’ gender and age on certain sites in the Google content network such as MySpace and Friendster, whose users provide that information about themselves. AdWords receives the data in anonymous and aggregate form from participating partner sites, which means that users can’t be personally identified.

Here’s an example of how demographic bidding works: suppose you sell women’s basketball shoes and want your ad to be seen by 18-24 year-old females. You could raise your bids to increase the frequency with which those users see your ads. You can also restrict your ads from certain users if you think they’re not meeting your ROI goals. In the case of women’s basketball shoes, you might find that the male, 18-24 year-old demographic is receiving a significant number of impressions but not clicking-through or converting well, and decide to restrict that group.”

So, how do you set your demographic bidding options? Go right to your standard Campaign Settings and choose Demographics (currently located in the Target Audience underneath location settings). Note – if this is a keyword targeted campaign and you DO NOT have content turned on, you will see “Only applicable on the content network.” Demographic bidding is only available to keyword campaigns with content turned on or on placement targeting campaigns.

This is what you’ll see:

So, you’ll see demographic info from the content/site providers that are able to deliver this data to Google. Most of these sites are social networks that will inherently collect this info during registration. Once you see some of your opportunities, you can click EDIT, which will allow you to affect your max bids on those keywords/placements within the campaign via an incremental percentage basis. This is similar to MSN’s demo targeting that has been in adCenter for years.

So, for example, if you want to reach more men and are willing to double your max bid when serving ads to men, you can EDIT and add 100%. One of the interesting features is the “Resulting Combos” when both an age group and a gender are combined. In the example below, females were give a plus 100% bid as well as anyone over 55. Thus, when a 55 or older female is served the add, the resulting max bid will be combined to 200% of the default.

Hint: Any current content or placement campaigns are already collecting demographic info and have since last year. You can go to your Reports tab, create a Demographic report, and see some very powerful data with regards to age and gender. You can get great, actionable insights into your business (or client’s business) with this report.

MSN content

This actually launched in Beta last year, but I thought it might be good to review for those of you who haven’t tried it out yet. There’s good news and bad news… the good news is that MSN Content only runs on MSN properties such as MSN.com, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, Fox Sports, etc. These are quality (I may go as far as saying “premium”) sites, so the value here is high compared to the “anyone with a website can join” mentality with Google and Yahoo. Obviously, the bad news would be a lack of total inventory volume, so the bids may start to get pretty high if the ROI is shown to be positive.

How does it work? Well, for all of you who understand how Google’s content targeting works, let me explain the difference with the MSN model. Google’s content targeting scans the page that the ad is being served on and figures out the contextual topic via the keywords. It matches the topic to a predetermined list of categories which are then matched to ad groups in the same way. MSN’s model is much simpler. Basically, it figures out the primary keywords on the page and then looks for ad groups that have those keywords in it. Make sure you understand this difference before you launch content on either engine.

How to sign up? One good feature of MSN content is that it’s set at the ad group level vs. the campaign level with Google. This can take more time to setup if you want all of your ad groups within a campaign to be set to content, but generally I prefer more granular controls that provide finer optimizations in the future…so setting it at the ad group level works for me.

For more info, including Tips for Success and Case Studies, check out the content advertising overview at the Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions site.

Free tool of the week: Gain insight into your competitors’ keywords

SEO Digger is one of my favorite “under the radar” sites to gain significant insight into a website’s natural rankings. It reminds me of AdGooroo, which is one of our must own tools here at Four Digital. AdGooroo allows you to load up a list of keywords with which the tool then scrapes the engines each hour and reports back what sites are coming up in the listings. SEO Digger is similar; it scrapes the engines, but instead of you defining the keyword list, SEO Digger has a list of 60 million keywords in its database that it is constantly searching for. So, if you type in a URL, you will see any of these 60 million keywords if they come up in the top 100 results in Google. Here’s an eBay search example:

It is a different tool than AdGooroo, which scrapes the engines every hour for paid and natural results using a user-inputted list of keywords. But SEO Digger can be a great way to serendipitously find keywords that you may have not even thought of. It doesn’t scrape every hour, but it is fairly up-to-date. One added benefit is that it includes Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery data as well. There is a Premium Version with more features, but I haven’t gotten into that yet. Please post a comment if you have used the Premium Version and have any feedback.

There’s some food for thought for you this week. Try out Google demo bidding and MSN content to beef up your accounts. Next week, I’ll highlight Yahoo’s Campaign Optimizer and Google’s newly updated Site and Category Exclusion tool. I’ll also show some search engines off the beaten path that can be helpful for keyword/ad group creation.

Josh Dreller is the Director of Media Technology for Fuor Digital, an agency concentrated in the research, planning, buying and stewardship of digital media marketing campaigns. Josh can be reached at jdreller@fuor.net. The In The Trenches column appears Fridays at Search Engine Land.

This is a huge deal for Microsoft, giving their ad program exposure to 20 million unique users and over 330 million page views per month. The contextual ads will begin to be displayed on the WSJ network as early as next month. The paid search ads timing has yet to be announced.

What does this mean to advertisers? Well, if you are bidding within Microsoft adCenter’s Content Ads, you are likely to see an increase in impressions and clicks. The adCenter Blog has tips on how to prepare for their new partner.

Microsoft signed a similar deal with CNBC in December.

Advertisers who have not yet participated in the ContentAds program will automatically be opted into the network on that date. So if you do not want your ads to run on Microsoft’s content network, which might be likely, fill out this web form by August 26th.

From the release:

Those advertisers who haven’t been participating in the Content Ads pilot will automatically be upgraded to include distribution on content pages within the Microsoft network. Advertisers whose campaigns are upgraded will have complete control over their campaigns and have the following choices:
- Hybrid: Run ads on Live Search and content pages using “hybrid” ad groups.
– Existing ad groups will automatically be set to display on content pages at current search ad bid prices. You can also set new bids for your content clicks.
- Turn off Content Ads.
– At the ad group level: Within the Ad Group Settings tab, under the Targeting section, click the Select a distribution method for this ad group link, and clear the Content check box.
– At the campaign level: On the Campaigns tab, select the check boxes next to those campaigns you’d like to edit. Click Bulk Edit. In the Edit settings for multiple campaigns section, from the Campaign settings drop-down list, select Content distribution, and click Apply. Please note that once you have turned off content distribution via Bulk Edit, you will have to manually adjust each ad group if you wish to turn content distribution back on in the future.
- Create content-only and search-only ad groups.
– You can create a unique destination URL or have content-specific ad creative.