Since they previously migrated all Yahoo algorithmic search results to Bing, the transition is now complete in these countries. The migration has been underway since February.

Next up for the transition comes Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Yahoo and Microsoft will start working with partners to make the change this month. The companies have typically offered migration assistant software, to help smaller Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers make the switch with as little pain as possible.

Previously, the Search Alliance migrated advertisers in North America and India.

The migration of advertisers follows the transition of all algorithmic results worldwide, on desktop and mobile, in 2011.

Besides the name change, marketing collateral and web sites will incorporate the large beautiful images that the Bing consumer site has become known for — to unify the brand experiences.

“Previously, there was just a lot of confusion around our brand,” Matt Lydon, general manager of Microsoft’s SMB Advertising group, told me.

The branding doesn’t need to be changed for larger enterprises and agencies because they already have account managers at Yahoo, via the Search Alliance relationship, who can explain how everything fits together. However, for small businesses, there was a big disconnect between the consumer Bing brand and what happened when they try to advertise on the search engine.

Small businesses are a particularly important audience for Bing, given the strength of Google AdWords among smaller advertisers. Since many of these folks are acting as CEO, CFO and CMO in their small businesses — not to mention running operations — it’s a challenge to get them to devote attention to a second PPC solution. Microsoft is hoping making things easier to understand will lower some of the existing barriers.

The company has already rolled out a new branded landing page for small- and medium-sized businesses, building on other efforts it’s making to simplify everything to attract these marketers. Lydon says it’s his group’s top priority and one of the top two priorities for engineers, as well.

Part of that effort has been to simplify the sign-up process for new advertisers. Previously, the company had “somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 to 20 pages” of information to fill out to sign up for an account. It took around 20 minutes. “We now have that down to two pages and five minutes,” Lydon said.

Additionally, the company is working to hide away some of the advanced — and more complicated — functionality in adCenter, hoping to make it easier to understand for new advertisers.

“We make them [the advanced features] available, but they [the advertisers] don’t get hit with all that in the initial phase,” said Lydon.

The new branding will be rolled out on web pages and marketing collateral that goes to current small- and medium-sized advertisers first, and will slowly be rolled out to every other communication platform, including those aimed at bringing aboard new businesses. On something public-facing like Facebook, the company will have two separate pages — Bing for consumers and Bing Business for advertisers.

In general, if you have a high SOV, you have an opportunity to expand into related terms and if you have a low SOV, you have an opportunity to improve performance on your existing terms. Let’s take a look at some recommended actions to take based on the new SOV reports.

My Take: I remember when we had to do PPC with absolutely zero data about search volume, trends, etc. We have come a long way now that we have detailed Impression Share data within our PPC accounts. This is a welcome addition to the onslaught of features adCenter has been adding to the platform over the past few months.

While adCenter is a bit behind AdWords on timing in general, they are also pushing the envelope when they do launch similar features. With this feature, they increase the fidelity of the reports compared to AdWords, by adding more detail about the reasons behind lost SOV. I get really excited when I think about what this pace of innovation looks like after they are done catching up to AdWords…

Overview: Share Of Voice

adCenter Share of Voice (SOV) metrics are live now. You can get overall SOV down to the ad group level, and they’ll tell you what percentage of your SOV is lost to either: budget, rank, bid, keyword relevance, or landing page relevance. Just customize a standard report at the account, campaign, or ad group level to get the metrics.

Metrics are only available with the Daily Report View (which is why they are greyed out if you try one of the other Report Views, like Summary, weekly, etc.).

Taking Action

Acting on SOV reports takes some consideration on the advertiser’s part. While at first glance they may not be as directly actionable as changing bids based on a keyword performance report, or adding keywords and negatives based on a search query report, SOV reports give you information about where and how to focus your optimization efforts.

One rule of thumb that I’ll share with anybody who will listen at adCenter or AdWords: Give us metrics for anything we can optimize, and let us optimize anything we can measure. Mercifully, SOV reports give us good metrics about things we can optimize.

What Is Share Of Voice (SOV)?

I had the opportunity to speak directly with Lucy Wang, a Product Manager on the adCenter team responsible for Share of Voice Metrics. She defines Share of Voice like this:

“Share of Voice represents the percentage of times your ads were actually shown in relation to the total number of chances your ads could have been shown, based on your keyword and campaign settings. It provides quantified insight into what your impression share is, and more importantly, the reasons why you lost certain impressions, allowing you to take precise action.”

To clarify a common misconception: SOV is not a measure of your impressions versus the total search volume for the keywords in your ad group (or campaign, or account). It is a measure of the impressions versus the search volume left over after considering your campaign settings (budget, targeting, etc.), and your rank, bids, and relevance.

By the way, Share of Voice and Impression Share are virtually interchangeable in this context. adCenter refers to this feature as Share of Voice, but uses Impression Share in the names of the metrics in their reports.

What Is A Good SOV?

There is no really good or single answer to this question. You will have to answer this for yourself. Every marketplace and advertiser will have different references for good and bad SOV.

My recommendation would be to simply take a baseline, check that it is either consistent across your account (or find out how it differs along meaningful divisions in your account) then improve it.

High SOV

When your SOV is comparatively high, you are already maximizing your ability to generate traffic for these terms, given your campaign settings. Assuming your performance and ROI justify it, this would be a good place to start to expand. Try additional keywords, or expand your geo-targeting and/or scheduling to try to attract more traffic, even if it is less relevant.

Remember, lowering your SOV is not necessarily a bad thing – it just means you are reaching into areas where you are not as relevant. That could be a good thing if the performance is still there. You can find the balance that is right for your business by experimenting with the limits.

Low SOV

All by itself, low SOV is not a very actionable metric; it is more like a summary to help you find where to dig in. Take a look at the details to find more actionable information.

Impression Share Lost To Budget

This is perhaps the most directly-actionable source of lost impression share. For direct advertisers, increasing budget is usually not an issue as long as ROI is within range. Assuming your performance metrics are within tolerable bounds, increase your budget and you will grow (hopefully, profitably).

Rule of Thumb: If you are spending less than a dollar to earn a dollar, why would you ever stop?

Even if you are truly limited by a budget, you may still have an opportunity to optimize. Remove, pause, bid-down, or reduce budget on your bottom-performers and spend more budget on your winners (by increasing budgets, bids, or both). Even brand advertisers can optimize, based on CTR, for example.

Rule of thumb: Use keyword bidding to manage budget. Use budget settings to manage risk.

Impression Share Lost To Rank

This is the first indication that you have some optimization to do. Rank is generally a combination of your Bid and Relevance, so at first glance we might expect this to be a composite score.

However, when you look at the numbers, this is an independent contributor to your overall lost Impression Share. They all add up to 100%. Skipping ahead a bit, the only place left to optimize would be your ads. Focus on your ad relevance and CTR if you are losing is due to Rank.

Impression Share Lost To Bid

This is pretty straightforward. Your ad is relevant compared to your competition, but suffered because your bid was not competitive. The direct action to take would be to increase your bid, assuming your performance and business can justify it.

However, assuming your bidding is already optimal for your business goals, then what do you do?

I think this is the one SOV metric that I’d be willing to live with long-term. If you can’t afford it, then you can’t afford it. Go focus on building the conversion value of your business, or expand elsewhere.

Of course, this also means that some other businesses out there are able to spend more money on these keywords than you are. Assuming they behave rationally; they are either better at monetizing, or more efficient in their business process, or both.

Impression Share Lost To Landing Page Relevance

This one seems pretty straightforward, but tends to be a challenge for many PPC Advertising efforts. Landing page Relevance might not currently be in your control – but it is in somebody’s control. If you don’t have a better landing page, then find a way to make one.

adCenter’s help is actually quite specific about what will improve your landing page relevance score:

• adCenter Help: About the landing page relevance score

The only thing I would add would be to make sure you are making new landing pages (or dynamically customizing them) for each meaningful group of keywords in your account. For most accounts, that means at least one distinct landing page per ad group.

Rule of Thumb: If you can write unique ad copy, or send to a unique landing page, then you should make a unique ad group.

Impression Share Lost To Keyword Relevance

This is a sure sign that you should be looking at your Search Query reports and looking for negatives. You may also need to delete underperforming keywords, or move them to other ad groups. You may also benefit from adding any search queries you are matching for, as keywords on Exact match.

If you weren’t already aware of this, adCenter has a distinct preference for Exact match. If you have a keyword running on phrase or broad match, the same keyword on exact match will be eligible for more search queries that are exact matches for your keyword. (Think about that carefully. Yes, it is accurately stated.)

Once again, the adCenter Support Center offers a good reference for addressing this issue specifically:

• adCenter Help: About the keyword relevance score

What’s Next

Like most aspects of PPC, Share of Voice is not a “set it and forget it” metric. You should be balancing the time you spend in your account based on SOV against the value you are deriving from it. That is Return on Time Spent, which is another article altogether:

• ROTS: Return on Time Spent
• Can Bing & adCenter Bring More To The Table For Large Advertisers?
• Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should: Why DIY SEM Isn’t The Answer

The company says the new version brings in more finely-tuned data from the Yahoo-Bing network on a wider range of keywords and competitive bids. Additionally, information on traffic, demographic and geographic data will be more in-depth, according to Microsoft. The user interface is redesigned, as well, in a way meant to be more intuitive.

Version 8 allows users to refine keywords by date range and using other parameters. Data can also be easily updated in a specific table or across all of the tables at once, depending on user preference.

The new software will also provide access to a collection of pre-designed Keyword Research Templates that bring up frequently-used data.

The tool doesn’t yet include data for mobile devices or from content sites. It’s available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Ireland and Singapore.  The tool is not currently available in India.

Older versions of MAI will stop working on May 15, so current users must upgrade. To use the Windows-only software, one must have Microsoft Office Excel 2007 or 2010 already installed.

As part of the transition, search advertisers that are still on Yahoo’s platform in those countries will need to migrate to adCenter because Yahoo Search Marketing accounts will shift to read-only status. But, in a blog post today about the pending change, Microsoft suggests monitoring both accounts during the transition:

As Yahoo! ad serving moves to adCenter, and your clicks and impressions in that account begin to increase, you’ll see a corresponding decrease in clicks and impressions in your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. It is thus important to continue managing your campaigns across both platforms throughout this transition phase, in order to avoid missing out on any potential clicks.

The transition is expected to begin “as early as” January April 18th and be complete by the end of the month. [Ed. note: Apologies for the typo there on the month!]

Microsoft says the transition is coming later this year to Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The hub is essentially a location where advertisers and agency folks can watch training videos and get up to speed on adCenter. The site keeps track of folks’ progress when they are logged in, so they can pick up where they left off with training. When the training is complete, people can take the Accredited Professionals exam (for $15) and, if they pass, they join the club.

Accredited Professionals get an official member badge, be placed in the membership directory, market themselves and their business through “Find a Pro. “

It is in some ways better than AdWords’ equivalent tools, and the Excel integration and wizard workflow are unlike anything AdWords makes available.

The adCenter team invited me to help them announce their recent innovations at Search Engine Strategies New York last week. I was somewhat surprised to learn that most Advertisers don’t even know MAI exists. I suspect that is because we don’t go looking for it.

We mostly limit our time with adCenter to copying what we have already done in AdWords; who would think of looking to adCenter for more advanced features and tools? You should. They have been quietly pushing a few features a bit further downfield than AdWords, and MAI (Microsoft Advertiser Intelligence) is one such tool.

Quick Tour

• MAI is a downloadable Add-In for Excel (download)
• Once installed, it adds a tab to Excel, with a ribbon bar full of tools
• Keyword Wizard: Walks you through using the next few buttons, all in one wizard
• Keyword Extraction: Extract Keywords from a list of URLs
• Keyword Suggestion: 3 Types
  • Campaign Association: Mine other advertisers’ keywords!
  • Queries that contain your Keyword
  • Related Search Keywords
• Traffic
  • By Month
  • By Day
• Demographics
  • Age Group and Gender
  • Search-User Location: Geography
• Metrics
  • historical & forecast trends and KPIs
  • Volume

When you take a closer look at the tool, you may notice there are other features available as well. The Quick Tour above highlights the features most useful for Paid Search Advertisers.

Keyword Generation

Keyword Generation is an important part of Paid Search throughout the lifecycle of an account. These tools help with generating keywords by starting with your “seed” terms and expanding them.

Perhaps the most interesting and effective is the “Campaign Association” feature. MAI states that it will “Generate keywords based on the bidding behavior of other adCenter advertisers.” I find this feature frequently finds new ideas that are worth testing, and that it also often shows keywords that I would not normally include in a campaign – they can be quite broad and possibly lack relevance for your account.

The tool will also expand based on related keywords and on search queries adCenter has seen that include your seed terms.

Keyword Extraction

This is a tool familiar to many SEO experts – it basically scrapes a webpage looking for relevant keywords. This is a terrific way to get seed terms and get a good starting list for new clients, or to double check your work across a list of URLs and a long keyword list.

Campaign Structure

Be careful using keyword generation tools at scale. They often do not help put things in the correct AdGroup. That organization would have to be done according to your own Campaign Buildout design.

Metrics

MAI will also produce historical and forecast traffic and monetization data (cost per click, clicks, average positions, etc.), and will break it down by match type. This is another example of where they are pushing the tools a bit beyond what is made available by AdWords, and in really useful ways.

API Access

All of the features exposed through MAI in Excel are also available directly through the API. There is a tremendous opportunity to build data-rich toolsets from these features, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this post.

Quota

Be aware that the tool accesses adCenter via the API, and the volulme of requests is limited. Individual advertisers might have success raising this limit by contacting their representatives.

Future Versions

The adCenter team is actively developing this tool, and we can expect future versions to show improved usability, more features, and hopefully more community support for Advertisers to share best practices around keyword generation.

Resources

• Download Microsoft Advertiser Intelligence
• MAI Tutorials
• Giant List of Keyword Tools

“When we talk about the 2012 spring release, which started in January and will continue through the June timeframe, we’ll get into a monthly cadence of launching capabilities to the market,” David Pann, general manager for Microsoft Advertising’s Search Network told me. “[This will be] both at the advertiser level and in changing relevance algorithms — matching, ranking, pricing, the black box. We’re making these changes giving advertisers more control and greater transparency.”

Following, a few of the enhancements coming up in the next few months:

Broad Match Modifier

Microsoft announced in a blog post today that it is testing this feature. Similar to Google’s Broad Match Modifier, this targeting feature will allow advertisers to create keywords with greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match.

AdCenter Express (For Small Businesses)

Similar to AdWords Express, Google’s simplified product aimed at small businesses, Microsoft will roll out a product that automates the process somewhat, aiming to ease and improve the experience for small business marketers, many of whom have plenty of additional responsibilities, in addition to marketing. Too many times, Pann said, small businesses set up campaigns but don’t have time to monitor them closely or tweak them, meaning they often are disappointed by results.

“Not only are they running restaurants or plumbing businesses, we’ve told them they need to be search engine marketing experts,” Pann said.

The new offering will start beta testing later this year and will officially launch at the end of the year or the beginning of next year, according to Pann.

More Rich, Integrated Ads In Bing

“[We're developing] richer kind of ad units that look more like content in context and allow us to help the user to complete a task and engage with an advertiser or merchant. as simply as possible,” said Pann.

As an example of things to come in the next three to six months, Pann pointed to current integrations such as the Open Table reservations functionality, which displays “Reservations” next to search results when users search for a specific restaurant. Hovering over over the word brings up a window where people can select a date, time and number of diners, and then be delivered to a specialized landing page on OpenTable.com.

Some of these integrations may be exclusive partnerships, such as OpenTable, while others could be part of the auction, judged on bid price and relevancy like any other advertisement — somewhat similar to Google’s product listing ads.

“If you as a consumer, were doing research on a product or thinking about buying it, rather than going to advertiser’s site to complete the transaction,” Pann said. “You could put it into the shopping cart directly from the Bing experience.”

Dynamic Location Extensions and Sitelink Extensions

Advertisers that have multiple locations will be able to set up ads that serve the most relevant result — i.e. the closest location — to consumers. Alongside the standard text ad, the closest business address and an optional phone number can be displayed.

Pann said sitelink extensions, presumably similar to Google’s product, is in a pilot stage now, and will probably roll out widely in the fall.

More Detailed Quality Score Data

Pann says advertisers will soon be able to get data on their quality scores for various match types and for mobile-only targeted ads.

“We’re giving them much more detailed data so they can improve their performance in the marketplace,” he said.

Desktop Tool For The Mac

Yes, Microsoft is developing desktop software to manage adCenter from the Macintosh.

“That’s something we’ve clearly heard from customers and we are going to be able to support that.” said Pann.

The re-introduction of Yahoo RAIS, mentioned by both Portent and Rimm-Kaufman Group, appears to be Microsoft’s answer to Google’s sitelinks extensions and product listing ads. It came out of pilot in October and is currently being offered to premium advertisers for their brand and navigational terms.

RAIS offers five different types of layouts. Two consist of an image, a favicon, deeplinks and a text entry box. The next two include a video thumbnail which expands and plays a video on click, a favicon, deeplinks and a text entry box. The text entry box can be customized and used to search the advertiser’s website — a user could enter a zip code and be taken to a page for the nearest location, for example. The fifth layout is aimed at pharmaceutical advertisers and complies with Food and Drug Administration guidelines, including all the required information.

The RAIS keywords are subject to approval, so advertisers must work with their account managers on that part of the process. Once the terms are approved, the account is enabled for RAIS features. Ad creation for RAIS must occur in the adCenter Web UI, as it’s currently not supported in the API or desktop client. When advertisers create a new ad group for RAIS, creating a Rich Ad may be selected as an option.

So far, Microsoft says CPC prices tend to be similar to text ads, while click-through rates are higher, because the advertiser controls a good portion of the real estate.

In addition to the RAIS functionality, Microsoft has now tweaked how it handles negative keywords. Now, negative keywords at the campaign and ad group level will now be combined to filter traffic together. In the past, negative keywords at the ad group level would over-ride those at the campaign level.

Finally, Microsoft is now rolling out a feature that lets advertisers use unique landing page URLs for each keyword match type that they’re bidding on.

The new feature will be available beginning this week within the adCenter UI and the adCenter desktop application. Advertisers will get an email at least a week before the functionality is rolled out to their accounts, and during the time their accounts are being enabled, they may not be able to make updates for up to 12 hours.

The Location Extensions allow local business advertisers on Bing and Yahoo! search results to display their addresses and phone numbers within the ads, similar to the Location Extensions in Google AdWords.

The interface for adding location extension information is pretty straightforward:

The Location Extensions are clearly part of the adCenter team’s intention to achieve feature parity with Google AdWords soon, as Eric Enge mentioned last month. One feature that differentiates Microsoft’s product a little from Google’s is the “Business icon” which only appears in association with the ads that are displayed on Yahoo!.

I spoke to the adCenter product managers (Shamit Patel, Peter Yang, Erin Zefkeles and Corinne Woodward) this week about the new features and they revealed a number of interesting details. The Location Extensions are unabashedly geared to make it easy for Google AdWords advertisers to copy ad campaigns into adCenter. Businesses such as nationwide department stores can upload up to one thousand locations at a time and associate them with an ad campaign.

I asked the team if they were concerned about whether the inclusion of additional information in the ads might detract from clickthrough interactions and reduce Microsoft’s revenues (since consumers could potentially just call phone numbers displayed and/or visit the store address in-person), and they stated that initial research indicated that would not be the case — display of the local information makes the ads appear more relevant to searchers, increasing clicks and overall engagement.

While the ads can be expected to increase calls and foot traffic to storefronts, they also increase CTR in testing. For anyone familiar with local online marketing, these findings are unsurprising and make it clear that there is likely to be some pent-up demand for location extensions for PPC ads appearing in Bing and Yahoo!.

A few other details:

• Microsoft doesn’t offer their own phone call tracking service, although advertisers are welcome to provision the ads using trackable numbers.
• Unlike Google’s Location Extensions, Microsoft doesn’t require the business listing to be drawn from Bing Business Portal. (From my perspective, this is actually a good thing, since Google’s requirement that location data be drawn from Google Places is less flexible and more restrictive.)
• Bing Business Portal profile pages can be set up as landing pages for these ads, if desired.
• Location Extensions currently will not show up on Bing/Yahoo syndicated search partner sites as of yet, but the adCenter team is evaluating other properties where the feature may appear sometime down the line.

The location extensions are a great addition for local search marketers, and will likely be advantageous for local companies to integrate as soon as possible, since they would likely result in more qualified clicks and store visits.

Shamit Patel reports that Microsoft intends to accelerate the rollout of more features, so I would expect more announcements from the adCenter team in the near future.