During a recent trip to adCenter headquarters, Eric Enge was able to get some insight into these new features, and what we can expect from adCenter in the near future, which he shared in his recent post Can Bing & adCenter Bring More To The Table For Large Advertisers?.

Here is a quick synopsis of the new features:

• Browser Compatibility with Safari and Chrome, and mobile devices
• Mobile Device Targeting
• Ad Description Lengths Increased

Browser Compatibility With Safari & Chrome

Status: Live

AdCenter silently released browser compatibility with Safari and Chrome this week, including mobile device support for iPad and other devices. Compatibility with Mozilla Firefox was also improved.

From our sources and anecdotal testing, the support appears complete and fully functional. This release supports adCenter’s efforts to increase the ease of access of the online marketing platform by enabling Advertisers to access the site from a wider variety of browsers and devices.

My Take: Manage adCenter from your iPad!

Manage adCenter from whichever browser or device you prefer. While this feature doesn’t seem at first like core functionality (like a change to Negatives or Device Targeting would be), it is one of the top-requested features on adCenter’s Feature Suggestion Forum for good reason; as Advertisers we want to maximize our time efficiency.

Advertisers want to work where we are comfortable, and this helps us do that. Many of us have come to expect ubiquitous access from a premier online business as a matter of course, but those of us who use Chrome / Safari, or who have ever wanted to check on a client off-hours from the nearest mobile device that is handy, will probably appreciate this release the most.

I also see this release as more evidence that adCenter is really listening and taking steps to actively improve the adCenter experience.

Device Targeting

Status: Live

AdCenter silently released support for device targeting recently. Device targeting enables Advertisers to choose which Devices their Ads will, or will not, appear on.

By offering this functionality, adCenter empowers Advertisers to create separate Campaigns to bid on devices with different Bids, Keywords, and Ads optimized for each Device.

Device targeting support now includes:

• Smartphones
• Android
• BlackBerry
• iOS
• Windows
• Other
• Tablets
• Android
• BlackBerry
• iOS
• Other

Barry Schwartz previously reported on this release: Microsoft adCenter Increases Ad Description, Adds Budget Widget & More Mobile Targeting Options

My Take: Include this in your 2012 plans

Mobile search is growing rapidly, there is no denying that. I tend to take future predictions with a grain of salt though, as the atmospheric trend lines tend to imply there will be more mobile searches than grains of sand on the planet Earth sometime during the next President’s term of office.

What I do know is that amongst my clients, mobile devices account for roughly 10-15% of our searches happening today, and that number is growing.

Mobile device traffic can have a wildly different Cost Per Acquisition, and may represent a prime candidate for optimizing your bids accordingly. You could also try different Keywords, Ads, etc., and you might be in a unique situation where you actually only want to target one Device vs. another.

For the majority of Advertisers considering carving out separate Mobile Campaigns and weighing that against the cost of implementation and long-term manageability, I’d recommend something like the following equation:

Potential = ((% of total Account Value) * (% increase in Value for new Campaigns)) – Cost of Implementation and Management

Of course, you will have to define what value means for your business. You might start with PPC Profit, Conversions, etc.

Ad Description Length Increased To 71 Characters

Status: Live

AdCenter silently increased the Text Ad Description character limits to 71 recently. This feature makes importing Ads from AdWords easier by accounting for the extra punctuation often required to import Ads from AdWords to adCenter.

My Take: The Little Things Really Do Matter!

Many Advertisers develop on AdWords first then copy to adCenter. Working with AdWords first is a simple matter of prioritizing time and focusing on what will deliver the biggest bang for the buck. This feature fixes a problem you have most likely come across if you have ever imported Ads from AdWords to adCenter.

When you import a Description Line 1 and 2 from AdWords, adCenter adds a space between them to form the single Description used in adCenter. This space accounts for the fact that usually AdWords Ads are crafted to work with a line-break in between them.

However, if you have two Descriptions from AdWords totaling 35 characters each, the extra space brings the total to 71 characters, and ultimately causes the Ad to be rejected in adCenter.

For a process that was supposed to be easy (importing from AdWords to adCenter), this was quite interruptive. Many Advertisers found that it necessitated maintaining different sets of Ads for the two platforms, or adjusting the Ads on AdWords to make room, etc. Going forward, this problem goes away.

In my opinion, this is more strong evidence that the adCenter team is making progress towards making our lives easier and increasing Advertiser time efficiency.

Resources:

• Can Bing & adCenter Bring More To The Table For Large Advertisers?
• adCenter Blog
• Microsoft adCenter Increases Ad Description, Adds Budget Widget & More Mobile Targeting Options

(1) adCenter increased the ad description length by one additional character from 70 to 71. They did this to help with import issues from other advertising products.

(2) There is a new quick campaign budget overview widget to get your budget details immediately.

(3) They added more mobile ad targeting to allow you to mobile OS such as Windows Phone, iPhone, Android, and Blackberry and Tablet OS options including iOS, Android, and RIM.

Here is where it is currently supported:

Related Stories:

• Microsoft Completes adCenter Upgrade
• Microsoft adCenter Fall Upgrade
• Microsoft adCenter Offers Appealing Upgrade
• Can Bing & adCenter Bring More To The Table For Large Advertisers?
• Search Alliance Begins First AdCenter Testing In Europe
• AdCenter Releases Support For Negative Exact Match Today

Today, I want to outline some of the most interesting conclusions I have from the meetings with the adCenter team on that trip. One of the things I learned is what the adCenter team is doing to make it more attractive for enterprise scale customers to leverage adCenter to expand the PPC efforts.

Firstly, there was a clear recognition by the adCenter team regarding the challenges they face. They have a large and dominant competitor. Advertisers will start with AdWords, and then consider adding adCenter if the budget allows. However, even this is not a given.

For an enterprise advertiser that wants to increase their spend by 20%, it is far easier to simply jack up their bids in AdWords than it is to build new campaigns in adCenter. There are many reasons for this, including basic differences in account structure and capabilities.

The adCenter team is heavily focused on addressing this issue. The key elements of their efforts are:

1. Simplifying the user experiences across all touchpoints.
2. Reducing the time and effort to import an AdWords campaign into adCenter.
3. Achieving feature parity as quickly as humanly possible.

The adCenter team refers to this as improving “Return on Time Spent”. The focus of the initative is to offer a better return for those advertisers who put their incremental dollars into adCenter. It is the right focus. And adCenter has some serious benefits to offer to enterprise advertisers, let’s look at the two biggest.

1. Audience Reach Is Still Sizable

comScore data shows that Bing’s market share is approximately 30% of the search market in the US. This is approaching 50%of Google’s market share, which is sizable enough to pay attention to.

The people searching on Yahoo, MSN, in Internet Explorer, and on Bing are often a different audience that the audience on Google. comScore data shows that 57 million of the searchers on Microsoft and Yahoo don’t use Google:

2.  Higher Likelihood of Purchase

There is also data to sugggest that there is a higher propensity for Bing users to convert into sales. According to ComScore, the unique searchers on Yahoo! and Microsoft sites (including Yahoo! Search, Bing, and partners) are likely to spend 24.1% more than the average searcher, and likely to spend 5.5% more than Google searchers in the U.S.

These two benefits merit serious consideration. No doubt that the adCenter team will face ongoing challenges, but advertisers can find incremental market share and potential conversions here.

The adCenter team is also working on making adCenter experiences more intuitive for their customers; delivering better insights for campaign optimizations; and new ad formats and features that will help customers unlock additional volume.

All in all, I conducted 10 different interviews of adCenter team members, and I saw a highly engaged team focused on their goals. I think that it is likely that they will succeed in significantly improving the Return on Time Spent for enterprise advertisers.

For those who are interested in more detail, I will be publishing these interviews in the coming weeks on the Stone Temple Consulting blog.

Mittlerweile benutzen fast 10 Millionen Nutzer in Deutschland regelmäßig Bing, das sind 20 Prozent der aktiven Internetnutzer hierzulande.

According to several third-party sources, Bing’s market share is smaller than the 20 percent figure cited above. For example, the following is StatCounter’s search engine data for Germany:

Source: StatCounter

NetMarketshare generally agrees, showing Bing’s PC search share at just over 2 percent.

The combined Bing-Yahoo “search alliance” share in the US is about 30 percent. However the search alliance has considerably less reach in Europe. While the organic-results merger was completed last year, Microsoft adCenter is just now rolling out in Europe.

Related Entries

• Search Alliance Begins First AdCenter Testing In Europe
• December “Explicit” Search Numbers: Bing Now Ahead Of Yahoo
• Report: Google Controls 44 Percent Of Global Online Advertising
• Bing, Yahoo Now Neck & Neck In US Search Market Share

The tool helps us generate the core concepts of a PPC Account in an easy-to-understand visual layout, without having to burden business users with all of the details. We call it the PPC Planning Matrix.

I’m going to gloss over the absolute basics of Campaign creation, and aim for a quick “How to Get Started Using the PPC Planning Matrix Today” entry.

If you are an expert with Paid Search, this tool may help you work with your customers to generate great PPC Campaigns. You might notice that while this tool covers all the required basics, it leaves room for your own additions and fine tuning. The real value in this tool is that it helps visually organize and collect what is needed to create PPC Campaigns.

Even if you are not a Paid Search expert, this article is still for you. This tool will help you organize your Account into meaningful Campaigns and AdGroups, and produce a bulk sheet that can be pasted into Google AdWords Editor or into adCenter Desktop.

AdGroups & Campaigns

Campaigns are like an organizational folder for holding AdGroups. In addition to the Campaign Name, the one obligatory setting is the Campaign Daily Budget. The tool provides a default of $500, which you are free to override.

Campaigns also provide the ability to change some advanced settings like geography targeting, or device targeting (i.e.: computers or mobile devices), which you are free to adjust after the tool generates a Bulk Sheet for you.

AdGroups contain Keywords and Text Ads. The one compulsory setting is the default Maximum CPC. This will apply to all of your keywords. If you apply a Max CPC for any keyword, then it trumps the AdGroup Default. The tool provides a default AdGroup CPC of $1.00, which you are free to override.

If you want to set keyword level CPC’s you can edit the bulk sheet when the tool is done.

Ads

Ads are what your customers see on their Search Results Page. You provide the Headline, the two lines of Description (combined into one for adCenter), a Display URL that your customers will see, and a Destination URL that your customers’ browser navigates to when they click on your ad. The tool provides some examples.

AdWords restricts the length of the various fields in an ad. The tool will highlight them red if they are too long. You can add up to 3 ads per AdGroup in this tool (AdWords allows more and you can add them later).

Keywords

Keywords are what AdWords and adCenter use to match your ads to actual user searches. Add keywords that are related to the AdGroup you are creating, and the Ads you already provided. The tool supports “Power Posting” keywords (I’m dating myself, for those of you who remember when Power Posting first came out).

You can add Broad, “Phrase”, [Exact], or –negative match keywords directly in the tool, and it will parse them into the bulk sheet as expected.

Errors?

The tool tries to help you fill it out by highlighting errors like a missing Campaign Name, missing Ads or Keywords, etc. The tool is also “protected” to prevent inadvertently breaking things. The adventurous at heart can use the password “StoneTemple” to unlock the worksheet.

Generate Bulk Sheet

Click the button. If nothing happens, be sure you have enabled macros. Change Macro Settings in Microsoft Excel

Import into AdWords Editor

Choose: File | Import CSV | Paste Text… Review and Accept the Proposed Changes. Don’t forget to Post your new Campaigns!

Import Into adCenter Desktop

Desktop doesn’t yet support importing from the Clipboard. You can save the bulk sheet to a new CSV file, or as of Desktop Editor Version 8.1.11291.0, you can import directly from AdWords (Beta).

Choose: Import | From Google Select Import From a File, and browse to the file on your Computer. Verify the columns line up and click “Import.” Don’t forget to Post your new Campaigns!

Take It For A Spin

If you would like to get started with the PPC Planning Matrix, please feel free to send me an email. You will get an automated response with a download link and you can get started right away. You could also adapt these ideas to your own tools. Have fun out there.

The first testing for the roll-out will commence mid-January and may involve up to 10% of Yahoo’s traffic in these geographies. Microsoft suggests advertisers closely monitor campaigns and be prepared to increase budgets if they’re more than 80% depleted. Testing and adjustments will continue until the companies are ready for a full roll-out, which is expected to be in the second quarter.

North American advertisers and publishers were transitioned to adCenter in 2010 and a new combined search marketplace was launched in India last September. In November, Microsoft said it was ready to begin expanding to Europe.

The algorithmic change — having Bing organic results serving on Yahoo properties — was accomplished (except for in Korea) last year.

Canonical Form

The canonical form of a keyword refers to the form of the keyword that Paid Search Engines use behind the scenes to match keywords to actual search queries. It is sometimes referred to as Normal Form (Normalized Form) or Equivalent Form. For this article, let’s call this Canonical Form, or Canonicalization.

Wikipedia has a good canonicalization reference, in case you are curious about the origin or use of the word. Every Search Engine does this a bit differently, but the basic principles are similar. So let’s cover this a bit theoretically, without dwelling on the details or the particular differences between Search Engines. We can start with case (e.g.: upper-case vs. lower-case letters).

Upper Case vs. Lower Case

Case is insignificant in paid search (at least, from a keyword matching perspective). Search engine canonicalization will match a user query for “nasa” with an exact-match paid-keyword “NASA.”

Search Engines regard the canonical form of “NASA” to be “nasa,” and they both are considered to match the user query exactly. For that matter, “NaSa” would also be an exact match, as well as every other combination of upper and lower letters. Similar things happen for punctuation.

Punctuation

In general, the rule is that punctuation is replaced with a space to translate to the canonical form. For example, you may have noticed that searches for “bikes com” will match your exact-match paid-keyword “bikes.com” and vice-versa. Likewise, leading, trailing, and double-spaces are all insignificant.

A user-query for “bicycle  store” will match a paid-keyword “ bicycle store” (with a leading-space and a “  ” double-space). AdCenter provides a list of extraneous characters on their help site. AdWords provides a list of ignored symbols on their help site.

Possessives

AdCenter addresses most of the high-volume and regular possessives directly (but not all of them). For example, the search query “Mike’s Bike” is equivalent to the canonical form “mike bike.”

In AdWords, it would be “mike s bike.” In adCenter’s parlance, adCenter normalizes the possessive form of words, such as Mike’s to Mike.

Plurals

Canonical form can collapse plurals together (but will not always do so). A user-query for “bikes” could match an exact-match paid-keyword “bike.” (Please note: I am aware this example is in direct contrast to the information provided via the link below with regards to plurals of the word “bike.” It is just an example for illustration. Check your own user query report to find examples where plurals are treated as equivalent and delivered as exact-match.)

Likewise for non-standard plurals, like “battery” and “batteries.” They may be treated as equivalent. Of the canonicalizations covered so far, this one seems to be the most inconsistently applied across search engines and over time.

Noise Words

Canonicalization can remove “noise words” from the mix as well. For example, Ad Center will canonicalize a paid keyword “bike for the beach” to be “bike beach.”

The noise words “for” and “the” are not considered when AdCenter matches the canonical form of your paid-keyword to the user-query. AdCenter provides a list of extraneous words on their help site. (I didn’t find an equivalent list on AdWords help – maybe the community will add it to the comments, below?)

So Far…

So far we have: (letter) case, punctuation, whitespace, and plurality, and possession, but there is more.

Did you notice that we have crossed into territory where canonicalization might start to modify the intent of the original search query? “Bike for the beach” implies a different user intent than “bike beach.” The former quite clearly looking for a bike, while the latter would most likely be looking for a place. This does not stop here – there is more.

Misspellings & Closely-Related Words

Taking this one step further, canonicalization will sometimes collapse misspellings, and even seemingly different words to be the same. I am going to use theoretical, illustrative examples here, without claiming that either engine actually canonicalizes these particular keywords in this exact way.

So, an example then; Consider a paid-keyword “bike mart.” Canonicalization could collapse misspellings like “bikemarte” to be equivalent. Similarly synonym substitutions can be made. “Cycle mart” could conceivably be canonicalized to “bike mart” (Again, this is an example meant to be illustrative. I don’t think the search engines have ever actually canonicalized “cycle” to “bike.”)

These canonicalizations happen in particular with brands that happen to be slight misspellings, and also as we reach into the tail for more specific keywords.

AdWords Specific Notes: “site:” & Broad-Match Modifier In Negatives

AdWords will remove “site:” words from your keyword as part of canonicalization. For example, if you add “site:SearchEngineLand.com Crosby” as a keyword, AdWords will consider that equivalent to a keyword “crosby.” It will ignore the rest.

Likewise, if you use “+” either accidentally or in an attempt to trigger broad-match-modifier functionality in a negative keyword, the “+” is ignored as an extraneous symbol. It has no effect.

When & Where is Canonicalization Happening?

Canonicalization applies to negatives and all match types. Canonicalization happens prior to matching via match type, it is like a pre-filter for comparing keywords and user queries. It is always on; You can’t turn it off.

Gather Your Own Data

Don’t take my word for it. You can gather your own evidence. Pull a search query report from a Search Engine that includes both the paid-keyword and paid-match-type, and the user-query it matched. Better yet, pull it from your own analytics source. You may be surprised at what you find.

Why?

Paid Search Engines are businesses (and that is a good thing, believe it or not.) As businesses, they monetize searches by collecting fees from advertisers who pay-per-click in a competitive auction market for each keyword. They are motivated to generate the most value from those searches.

In an admittedly simplistic view, they may seek to “maximize profit, ” “maximize user value,” or “maximize advertiser value,” or some combination of all three. Let’s consider the “keyword market” for each user query the Search Engine receives.

On one hand, Search Engines could provide literal interpretation of the user-queries, and require advertisers to discover and manage all of the various forms of punctuation, capitalization, etc. to match each user-query literally.

In our example above, this would require an advertiser to run 2^4 variations of “NASA” to cover the various ways people could search for “NASA” using different capitalization (e.g.: “Nasa”, “nASA”,etc.). Clearly, this is way too granular, provides minimal incremental value, and would be quite burdensome on the advertisers. Advertisers would stop short of full coverage because it just wouldn’t be worth it. So Advertiser burdens would detract from user-value, and ultimately, Search Engine value.

On the other extreme, Search Engines could collapse everything. Advertisers would have one thing to manage, and would be eligible to appear on every SERP (Search Engine Results Page) for any user-query. Selling travel? Bid $5.25 for “run of site” on Google.com. Selling bird feeders? Bid $5.15 for run of site on Google.com…

Obviously, that would not provide anywhere near the value generated by breaking up the keyword markets in a more granular way. We need to draw a line somewhere. That is the game Search Engines play, and thankfully they play as rational businesses.

In this context, the low-level canonicalizations of case, punctuation, etc. are readily explained. But what about the more interesting cases? Now that we have set the stage, let’s consider a more interesting example; “bike” and “cycle” (theoretically, of course).

Let’s say that searches for “bike” monetize for the Search Engines at $.15 CPC, and searches for “cycle” monetize at $.10. If we could collapse the two keywords, we’d be looking at an incremental $.5 per click every time a user clicks on an ad after searching for “cycle.” Granted, this gets complicated fast as we could argue that the value is diminished, so the advertisers would adjust their bids down, which would reduce the effective CPC and mitigate the expected gains. Yes, they probably would.

We could also consider CTR, ad relevance, etc. They would all be impacted. It is a moving target to be sure. The point is; the Search Engine has a mechanism for collapsing keyword markets (or leaving them distinct). They play this game according to whatever their goals and values are, and just as with most human endeavors, they play it imperfectly.

So What?

This is the fun part. What can you, the discerning PPC Advertiser that you are, do about all of this? You can use it to your advantage to save time and to optimize your accounts.

For starters, you are already reaping the rewards of matching all the different combinations of capitalization, punctuation, misspellings, and other variations on your keywords that just don’t matter. Now that you know why and how, there are also some things you may start to notice, and some things you can do more actively.

For example, have you ever wondered why adCenter Desktop is kicking out words as duplicates, when they don’t appear to actually be duplicates? AdCenter added a canonicalization filter to the Desktop Editor. It stops words from being uploaded before they even make it to adCenter. The same thing would happen if you tried to add them via the Web interface. AdWords tends to allow you to add them regardless, and then sorts it out later by dividing up the traffic between them. While adCenter can be a bit obtrusive in this process, I personally like knowing that every keyword is a unique keyword in adCenter. This brings us to our next opportunity.

You can also save yourself the effort of adding all the different variations of “YourSite.com”, “YourSite com”, “www.YourSite.com”, “www YourSite com”, etc. Just because AdWords or adCenter lets you add them, doesn’t mean they are adding coverage or doing good things to your account. A generalized best practice is to manage all of your keywords in lower case, replacing all punctuation with ” “, and trimming all leading, trailing and double spaces.

If you want to be really complete, you could even remove all the extraneous noise words; this helps you make sure you are not bloating your account with effective duplicates. One possible exception would be if you are using Dynamic Keyword Insertion and have a word like “NASA” that should appear in all caps. In this case, you would of course want to add the keyword with all caps.

Let’s take that a step further and actively remove effective duplicates from your account (e.g.: words that you have been able to add, but that have equivalent canonical forms). If you have them in your account now, you are effectively dividing your traffic arbitrarily between them.

You have an opportunity to collapse that data down into one keyword, removing bloat and giving you more direct control over bids, ads, destination URLs, etc. For the coders out there, adCenter provides an API call GetNormalizedStrings Service Function to assist with this process.

Here is an Excel formula that does much of the basic canonicalization work for you:

=TRIM((SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(CLEAN(LOWER(A1)),"'"," "),"."," "),","," "),"-"," ")))

You could safely use this on the majority of your keyword and negative-keyword operations and improve the manageability of your accounts.

Here is one last handy trick (and if you have read this far, you deserve some gold stars). You can reset AdWords Quality Score on a keyword by adding it with different capitalization. Try it out in your account.

Go find a keyword with a terrible Quality Score (4 or lower), then add that keyword with different capitalization. You should start out with a default (hopefully higher) Quality Score. Here is your chance to breathe new life into that dying keyword! Now make sure you have the best ads possible, great negatives, and a healthy bid to get this one back on the starting lineup.

Good Luck out there, and Happy Holidays!

The mortgage scams under investigation by SIGTARP involve bad actors who lured in unsuspecting troubled homeowners with online advertising. The ads, and accompanying landing pages, made false promises to homeowners who sought to restructure their mortgages and lower their payments. Some landing pages showed seals that made them falsely seem to be government agencies. Instead of helping, some took up-front payments, got property deeds signed over to them, and encouraged homeowners to cease communicating with their lenders. Others convinced homeowners to hand over sensitive financial information. SIGTARP says some victims lost their homes as a result.

“Many homeowners who have fallen prey to these scams were enticed by Web banner ads and online search advertisements that promised, for a fee, to help lower mortgage payments,” said Christy Romero, Deputy Special Inspector General for SIGTARP, in a statement.

Last week, SIGTARP announced a similar operation with Google, which involved 85 different scams and more than 500 online advertisers and agencies.

Support for the new features will be available on the web interface immediately. Support for the Desktop Editor and API will follow shortly.

Along with this update, keyword-level negatives will be going away. The impact of this should be minimal, as most advertisers avoid using them. The non-cumulative nature of adCenter’s negatives — adding a keyword-level negative would then ignore any Campaign or AdGroup negatives — along with the character limit (10,000 characters) have been practical barriers to managing keyword-level negatives for most advertisers.

This update will not include negative broad match. Advertisers can still use phrase and now exact match to filter out the queries that don’t match their keywords well.

AdGroup negatives will continue to fully replace Campaign negatives (as opposed to being cumulative, as with AdWords). This platform choice requires extra management effort from advertisers, and the recent bulk-edit improvements to the Editor are no doubt intended to address this issue directly. AdCenter is reportedly considering moving to a system more like AdWords. Either approach can be effective, but they do have different requirements for easing the manageability. (See below for some online discussion forums where you can voice your opinions and wishes.)

Microsoft says the adCenter team is doing their best to implement the features advertisers want the most – and, in this advertiser’s opinion, the introduction of negative exact match is strong evidence of that this is the case.

Timing

An adCenter representative confirmed this update will be releasing today, November 17, 2011. I was also told it has been in beta with select advertisers (who probably can’t talk about it because of NDA obligations).

How this will impact Advertisers

We will be able to refine the targeting of our AdGroups (and possibly reorganize them according to our needs). I’ll explain with an example. I like to run “Airtight” AdGroups, like the following:

• Terrain(Mountain) Type(Bike)
• Terrain(Mountain) Type(Bike) Accessory(Tires)

You might imagine that in this example, we want searches for “mountain bike tires” to go to the 2nd AdGroup, but not the 1st. We can do that today; We just add “tires” as a negative-phrase match to the 1st AdGroup. However, this does not prevent broad matches in the 2nd AdGroup from picking up stray searches for “mountain bikes” (i.e.: without the “tire”). When this feature goes live, we will be able to prevent these leaks. We can simply add a negative-exact match for “mountain bike” into the 2nd AdGroup, and voila!

Pro-Tip:

You can crack open a Search Query Report today and find out if you are picking up unwanted (or poorly-targeted) traffic. I hope to release an article about our Search Query Report PPC Shop Tool soon. Here is a Screen Shot:

Online Discussion

Mention of the feature “leaked” into adCenter Help. (Expand the “Add negative keywords to ad groups” section.)

The feature is officially “planned” according to the adCenter feature-suggestion site.

Here is a verified post from MSFT on the adCenter forums.

Do you have some favorite wants and wishes? You can voice your own most-wanted features on the adCenter feature-suggestion site.

Microsoft said, the “European roll out is scheduled to begin with the UK, Ireland and France in the second quarter of 2012.”

Yahoo and Microsoft have already transitioned the search ad technology in the U.S. and Canada, as well as some other regions. But the transition scheduled slowed as revenue figures did not meet estimates and advertiser expectations were poor.

Yahoo and Microsoft has completed the organic transition less than a month ago. The only migration left is the organic Korea region and much of the paid search and publisher transition.

To stay up to date on the UK transition, watch searchalliance.com/uk for updates.

Related Stories:

• Yahoo Completes Global Organic Transition To Bing (Except Korea)
• Yahoo Asia & More European Properties Transitioned To Bing Powered Results
• Yahoo UK & Others Switching To Bing Organic Results August 3rd
• Yahoo Begins Testing Bing Powered Results This Month
• Yahoo Search Advertisers Can Now Begin To Migrate Accounts To Microsoft adCenter
• Yahoo-Microsoft Organic Transition Happening, Site Explorer, Search Monkey Holding For Now
• What’s New With Bing & Yahoo Search Alliance
• Official: Yahoo’s Results Now Come From Bing