In this final post, Vincent takes us through the supporting features of Bing Webmaster Tools that includes the Bing Webmaster Help Center, API integration, and Alerts, Messages & Notifications. We’ll also hear [as much as can be shared] about the future of the platform and how Vincent and the team are looking to improve the offering over time. Finally, two search firms will share some insights in how BWT helped their clients succeed.

Bing Webmaster Help Center

The Webmaster Tools Help Center, which launched last year, not only documents the BWT tool fundamentals, but also makes it possible for the support team to respond quickly to common problems faced by users.

Now, when a question spikes in the forums or bubbles up through the support channels, the team can instantly draft a suitable help topic which they can publish very quickly to the Web. Since it’s such as important tool in communicating with users, Bing was eager to integrate it into the existing webmaster stack, which is why it has the same look and feel as the rest of the tools.

The Help Center navigation is smartly structured to mirror how the platform features are organized:  from My Sites, through Configuration, Reports & Data, down to Messages & Alerts. In addition to being a support site for the tools and features, it hosts content and webmaster guidelines as well as other useful topics and FAQs. Vincent tells me that this year they’re planning to do an even better job with webmaster documentation and education initiatives.

For example, Sr. Product Manager Duane Forrester has already recorded a series of free webinars which will be uploaded to the Help Center. On top of that, the Bing Webmaster Tools team has more innovative things in the works that will help users to become more successful in their search efforts.

Tools/Integration

“There are several tools out there that make use of our data and functionality,” Vincent says, “Practically all of our functionality, from configuration to data import and export, can be automated using the Bing Webmaster API. In fact, we make a point of adding open API calls for all of our new features so that enterprise customers can automate recurring tasks and agencies can handle large volumes of clients from within the comfort of their own systems.”

All you need to manage and control your site to access your data programmatically is a Webmaster API key which you can generate from inside Bing Webmaster Tools. With the Bing Webmaster API, you have the flexibility of using SOAP, POX/HTTP, or the JSON/HTTP protocol to get access to your all of your website data. (Note: the full documentation for the Bing Webmaster API can be found here.)

Alerts, Messages & Notifications

The Webmaster Tools are essentially the gateway for all direct communication between Bing and site owners. In the same way BWT collects site information in the form of sitemaps, crawl settings, and other input – they give data back in the form of reports and data. In the Message Center, there are four alert/message categories today:

• alerts regarding indexation issues
• notifications about crawl issues
• malware alerts
• administrative messages

In some ways, the alert system may even be the most important feature of the Webmaster Tools as it helps you stay on top of urgent issues with your site. For example, you might receive an alert about a spike in crawl errors seen during the last 24-hour crawl cycle that could be related to server or connectivity issues that would otherwise go unnoticed. The crawl error alerts are very detailed and cover a lot of problem scenarios; you can access the full list of crawl errors here. If BWT discovers that your site has been compromised by malware, this is the one place where you find out.

“My call to action to our users is to make sure to set up a forwarding email address in the profile section and to adjust the contact preferences to allow us to send you alerts,” Vincent suggests, “That way, we can send you a notification about new and unread messages for each of the sites you manage to your email inbox. If you fail to take these steps, we cannot email you.”

Agency Case Study #1:  Resolution Media

Omnicom’s Resolution Media is one of the largest and most successful search agencies in the world and has used Bing Webmaster Tools on many occasions to help their clients succeed in search engine optimization. Dave McAnally, Content Team Director, relayed to me this recent use:

The agency organic search team was working with a client who was pretty aggressive in their SEO tactics and had been engaging in some very cutting-edge strategies. Unfortunately, the Resolution Media team discovered that through the course of all the scraping and scripts that the client team had implemented, some malware had made it to the site. It was Bing Webmaster Tools which alerted them to this issue, and they let the client know immediately so they could remove the offending element. Had they not had the BWT alert functionality available, the Resolution Media team wouldn’t have detected this issue.

“Bing’s malware detection functionality is a great feature,” McAnally confirms. “We got feedback on some sketchy content on a site before anything else detected it, and as a result, we were able to prevent any security breaches, ranking compromises and likely kept users who visited the site safe”

Agency Case Study #2: Perfect Search Media

Perfect Search Media is a Chicago-based independent, full-service digital media agency. Their Search Engine Marketing Director, Joel Benway, explains how Bing Webmaster Tools has become an integral part of their proprietary SEO tool box.

Perfect Search Media has demanding clients that want quick and accurate analyses of their websites’ visibility, health and organic search status. Their clients need their agency to create actionable SEO strategies and proposals on what can sometimes be extremely short notice. After learning about the upgrades to Bing Webmaster Tools, Perfect Search Media thought maybe BWT could help their sales and project management team by being a one-stop-shop solution for their clients’ SEO needs.

“The BWT SEO Reports Tool and Keyword Research Tool are extremely helpful,” Benway says, “We can quickly generate compliance reports with the most important SEO on-page best practices as well as search trends on organic keyword searches. These tools are a huge upgrade from other technologies previously available.”

In the past, generating this type of reporting was time consuming and involved several different kinds of tools and modifications. The Perfect Search Media team confidently feels that Bing Webmaster Tools simplifies the entire process by providing a great set of features focused on efficiency and relevancy.

Future Plans For Bing Webmaster Tools

“As discussed in the previous posts of this series, we like to keep a tight lid on our future plans,” says Vincent.  “However, one thing we plan to do is to keep improving our capabilities to support our international audience. From the start, we made sure that our tools were available in all the markets that Bing operates in. To offer the best experience, we localized the toolset in over 40 languages (and counting) from German, French, and Spanish through to Catalan, Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean. As a matter of fact, more than 50% of our users are from outside of the US and are using our tools in their local language every day.”

As Bing expands its global reach, the Bing Webmaster Team will focus not only on consistently improving the user experience, but also adding capabilities and features that help webmasters and search marketers across the globe with their performance in international and local markets. As a small prelude to that, they recently completed end-to-end support in the Webmaster Tools for sites that use International Domain Names (IDNA) which had been on both their and the users’ wish list for some time.  They now support all Webmaster functionality for domain names containing non-ASCII characters such as http://bücher.ch as well as internationalized top-level TLDs such as .рф for the Russian Federation.

Vincent seems very interested in user feedback, “Obviously we have a lot more up our sleeve here, but I would really love SearchEngineLand readers to let us know which internationally-focused features they care about most in the comments!“

In this second piece, we’ll dive deeper into the history behind BWT, as well present more of the advanced reports and dashboards that BWT offers.

History Of BWT

Growing Bing Webmaster Tools from a nameless, internal toolset to a public-facing product suite was no easy task. Whereas the in-house UI didn’t have to look pretty or have intuitive navigation and controls, it was obviously very important to nail down the look and feel to something that would meet the high expectations of the search engine optimization and webmaster power users.

“The usability testing we did was a revelation,” Vincent admits. “It opened our eyes to simple mistakes we were making every time we updated the site. Research prior to this had nailed down the feature set of tools we needed to focus on, but that usability testing broke us out of our comfort zone and forced us to face some blind spots we’d grown over the years.”

As the build team continued to engineer a pretty face on top of the tools they already had, there was another concern growing day-by-day — it became obvious that more features and dashboards would be needed to round out the offering to something that was not just helpful, but absolutely desirable by the user community.

Benefiting the project greatly was that fact that all three of the program heads had been search engine optimizers previously; and, this deep, practitioner point-of-view absolutely encouraged them to strive even further that they had before.

“Fielding a ‘meme’ set of tools just wouldn’t cut it. This wasn’t an effort to best anyone per se, but the fact was, as SEOs ourselves, we saw a gap,” says Vincent. “We knew there were a series of tools missing that could provide actionable, useful data from the source. I mean, does it get better than having a search engine tell you what SEO work you need to focus on? How about seeing link data for a competitor, again, provided by the search engine? Our team set out a list of features and tools we thought would be useful. We brought in the research data and overlaid that. It was immediately evident we were on the right track. From that point on, the dedication from our Engineering and PM teams saw the final product become a giant step forward for webmaster tools in general.”

When I asked Vincent what ideas didn’t make it into the final release, he winked at me and maintains that there are “enough items left on the shelves to delight webmasters for years to come,” but isn’t able to share any of those brainstorms are at this timed due to obvious, competitive reasons. I guess we’ll have to wait for the next suite version and see what they come up with.

For now, though, search engine optimizers should find the current tools more than adequate to handle the day-to-day needs of SEO.  Let’s continue on with more insight into the current feature set…

SEO Reports

Bing now offers SEO Reports based on a small set of approximately 15 SEO best practices. The reports run automatically every other week and are available through a webmaster account. They run the same SEO best practices as the SEO Analyzer tool (see below), but for these reports, BWT scans all domains listed in an account and builds individual reports for each.

The SEO Reports are more or less read-only — otherwise, the system does the scanning of all pages (appearing in their index) and reporting automatically.

These reports provide aggregated counts of all the issues found, across the entire website scanned. Clicking on a URL specified  takes you deeper into the SEO Analysis Detail, where the BWT explains the issue and shows the individual pages affected by this non-compliance with the SEO Best Practice.

SEO Analyzer

SEO Analyzer is an on-demand, real-time tool. Based on the same SEO best practices as the SEO Reports, this tool will scan any URL you enter from one of your verified domains and build a report to let you know if the page scanned is in- or out-of-compliance with each best practice.

This tool can scan a single page at a time, making it great for checking new pages to understand where more work may be required. Users simply type in the URL they want scanned and clicks the Analyze button. The tool fetches the page, analyzes the page against the predetermined best practices and displays a compliance report in seconds.

• The left side of the page displays the “SEO Suggestions” based on items found out-of-compliance with the Best Practices scan.
• “Error Count” tells the viewer how many items for that particular suggestion have been found on the scanned page.
• Clicking on any “Description” filters the view on the right side to showcase only warning buttons associated with the SEO Suggestion selected.
• The right side of the page displays a view of the site with the compliance items noted where they reside on the scanned page.  They are noted by the colored button with the plus symbol (+) in the middle. Hovering on any button will expand the button to explain the issue at that location. Clicking on “Expand” within the text box will expand the box to show the full explanation for the flag. Click the minus symbol (-) in the button to close the text box completely.
• Clicking “Clear Selection” clears the filters and displays the page view with all buttons present.
• Selecting “Page Source” (see image below) across the top of the page viewing window on the right side will display the page code found when scanning the page.
• Selecting “Original” simply shows the page scanned as it would appear on the Internet.

When in source view, the yellow little arrows (up and down) on the right make it really easy to navigate the errors — no need to scroll up and down — using the arrows takes you to the exact locations inside the page’s source where the errors (of the selected error type) occur.

Also worth noting: when entering a URL that redirects, BWT will show that the page was redirected and what the redirect “hops” were before we hit the landing page. This is a nice little detail that helps detect redirects.

Link Explorer

This beta tool will allow a webmaster to explore links associated with a domain. It may be applied to any domain they choose to enter, and for the entered URL (one at a time), the tool will supply a list of known links pointing to the specified URL, and this is not limited to the domains within their account.

The default setting will be to display external links pointed at the specified URL, though this can be switched to show internal links as well.

The webmaster can also change the scope to show links pointed to either a domain, or an individual URL. If desired, the webmaster can enter specific anchor text they’d like the tool to locate as well, thus displaying the inbound links associated with the anchor text sought.

A further refinement permits the system to perform an additional query, allowing you to drill in on specific keywords which appear on pages of other sites, which point links at you. Essentially, “show me all the pages that link to me with this text on the page: ____________.”

Recently, BWT took the beta tag off and introduced some enhancements:

• Each Source URL itself is now a hyperlink, and clicking on the hyperlink explores all inbound links pointing to that specific URL
• Each entry in the Title column is hot now, too, and clicking it takes you to the linking page

There is a distinction between Link Explorer and the Inbound Links tool (which sits under Reports & Data). Whereas Link Explorer is the ideal tool for quick competitive backlink analysis on an arbitrary (that is, competitor) site, the Inbound Links tool provides comprehensive backlink analysis for your own site showing up to 1 million inbound links to the site and link text details for up 20K links per page on your registered site. The two combined make for an unmatched backlink analysis experience.

I hope you are enjoying this deep dive into this very comprehensive, free tool. In the next and final post of this series, we’ll cover more of the features in Bing Webmaster Tools, such as alerts and notifications. We’ll also speak to a few search marketers who have used BWT in real-world situations and get their feedback.

The marriage between search practitioners and the engines has always been, at best, a work in progress. On one hand, search engines need to protect their most valuable assets, such as their SERP algorithms and their paid-platform ecosystem.

However, on the other hand, they need to be able to work well with their clients and offer them the tools and the data so the programs are successful enough to continue to thrive. It’s a delicate balance at times…

Vincent Wehren, Bing Webmaster Tools Sr. Program Manager at Microsoft, is determined to support search marketers at every step of the way:

“If we can help a publisher build a better product, the search results improve,” he explains. “That better product is in turn better positioned to meet the searcher’s need, which matches our goals of providing excellent search results for searchers. Along the way, you can see efficiencies in content discovery, entity understanding and in a host of other subtle places that help Bing better understand what content should rank well.”

Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT)

If you haven’t yet checked out the tools in BWT, let me tell you this: this isn’t your father’s webmaster tools. It feels more like a comprehensive, paid SEO platform than an automated help center which has been the model to date with these things.

No offense to the other webmaster tools on the block, but I share the common consensus among search practitioners that the engines generally drip out just enough data to keep the search community satiated for a moment. BWT totally opens the kimono to allow marketers to truly mine what accounts to proprietary engine data.

When I asked Wehren how they built these tools, he explained that they were somewhat assembled internally even before they released them to the public.

“Something interesting that most folks don’t realize, is that the SEO tools in BWT actually started as tools built for us to perform SEO at scale for MSN,” he says. “They are a different, more advanced version in this current form, but that was the starting point.”

In this series of posts, we’ll go very deep (and under the hood, thanks to Wehren) to get a better understanding not only on how Bing Webmaster Tools can be very beneficial to organic search optimization, but also for paid search pros and marketers in other disciplines.

Platform Overview

The current BWT homepage lists four key benefits:

• “You want traffic and we can help you find it. Getting traffic to your site starts with being listed in the search results shown on Bing. Our tools can help you with this step.
• You need to know why people came to your site. Understanding what leads people to your website can help you understand what to focus on to increase traffic. Our reports can help with this.
• You want to improve your site, but don’t know where to start. Knowing which items to adjust on your website can help take the anxiety out of making changes. Our tools can scan and recommend work items for you.
• You need to know what areas to expand on your website. With research tools a click away, we can help you understand exactly what people are searching for, helping you know where to expand next.”

To give you a better sense of what kind of tools and reports can be found in his suite, a few them include:

• Page Traffic. A quick overview of your top pages in terms of search impressions and clicks
• Search Keywords: A quick overview of your top keywords in terms of search impressions and clicks with a link to the full details
• SEO Reports: Top SEO suggestions based on what we see on your pages
• Crawl Information: A quick glance at issues Bing encountered when crawling your site
• Site Activity. A chart which shows you data such as a graphical trend for Appeared in Search (impressions), Clicks from Search, Pages Crawled, etc.
• Diagnostic Tools. These include a Verify Bingbot Tool, Markup Validator, SEO Analyzer, etc.
• Messages and Alerts. From BWT to you at various dimensions which you can configure
• Link Explorer. The Bing reincarnation of Yahoo! Site Explorer which allows search marketers to perform competitive backlink analysis as part of their link strategy

Here’s a sample screenshot of the Site Activity report that demonstrates how clean and intuitive the platform is. As you can see, users can hover over specific time periods for more granular insights.

Getting Started with Bing Webmaster Tools

The first step you will need to do is to add your site to your BWT account.  There are three ways to verify your site. You can add a metatag to your index page <head> code, a file to your server, or you can make a change in the DNS settings to prove ownership.

After you’ve taken the action of your choice, you simply click the Verify button and the Verify Ownership page. and the Bingbot will be sent over to take a look. If it’s your first website being added to your account, the Verify button will be prominently displayed on the page for you to complete your action.

The Crawl Control feature allows the webmaster to control when Bingbot crawls your site and at what intensity. Presets can help you create custom crawl patterns (for example, harder in off-peak business hours; lighter when customers are on the site) or you can drag and drop their mouse over the grid to create their own pattern.

It couldn’t be easier; just click Save for the pattern to be enabled. The dark gray line represents the current time based on the user’s computer.

The Dashboard is specific to a single domain and displays information related only to that domain. From this view, you can find some great data about your site as well as drill down into other reports.

Notice at the top, there is a  drop down menu to select other domains you have in your account. On the right, you’ll find the date range and preset range selectors:

Site activity displays KPIs for the site based on the selected date range. Clicking on See Reports & Data Graph leads to more data and an interactive graph for viewing site activity information in more detail over time.

On Sitemaps, you’ll find a snapshot of the sitemaps associated with the website. Clicking the Submit a Sitemap button… 

….opens a small entry bar where the webmaster can type in the URL for the sitemap they wish to add.

Clicking on See all # with options takes you deeper into the Sitemap section.

Search Keywords is a snapshot of the keywords that sent traffic to the website. Clicking on See all # will take you to the keywords reports section with more information about keywords and traffic from Bing.

In future posts, we will discuss, with Wehren, about the history of BWT, show more screenshots, provide insider tips on the tools within, and learn more about the direction of BWT and what search marketers can expect from this evolving platform.

Suggested use:

• Launch AdWords Editor and open your Account
• Launch the Tool – keyboard: ALT-T-O (menu: Tools | Keyword Opportunities (Beta))
• Uncheck the box for “Include Additional Items”
• Set Match Type to “Exact”
• Input your seed keyword, and click the “Get Keywords” Button
• Select & drag/drop keywords into targeted AdGroups

A Brief History Of The Tool

Google released the Keyword Opportunities (Beta) with Editor 6.5 nearly 5 years ago, as previously reported by Barry Schwartz.

The current version of the tool is quite slick and integrated with Editor. Google’s help on the Keyword Opportunities Tool covers the main Keyword Expansion part of the tool, as well as the other tabs available from Keyword Opportunities. More detailed usage instructions, tips and tricks follow.

Uncheck The Box For “Include Additional Items”

The tool does a nice job generating keywords tightly related to the seed keyword. Check this box if you want to cast a wider net; but, I found that it generates a wide array of results that overlap with a more organized approach seeding more specific keywords.

If you do check the box, “additional items” appear below the more-targeted result set, so you can give it a try and see for yourself what works for you.

The tool automatically dedupes against your account; It will not suggest keywords that you already have in your account. One gotcha; it checks against your live account, not the local copy. I suggest you Post changes between runs of the tool, so you don’t end up with duplicate keywords to clean up.

Set Match Type To “Exact”

I do this beforehand so I don’t accidentally add all of these keywords on Broad Match. Best practices in our shop dictate that we push toward Exact Match, with limited use of Broad Match to find new search queries we can add on Exact Match. Even then, we usually emphasize Modified Broad Match.

You may, of course, add the keywords with whatever Match Type works for your account. You can also add negatives (instead of keywords), if you find something you don’t want to match for.

Input Your Seed Keyword

Try to be specific enough that you know you can write targeted ads for the results, but broad enough that you are not needlessly limiting your results. The results tend to be pretty tightly targeted around this keyword.

Select & Drag/Drop Keywords Into Targeted AdGroups

This is where the tool really excels. You can filter, select, multi-select, and drag/drop keywords over to your existing AdGroups. Keywords that have already been added are marked with a [+] so you can sort by that and more easily find the keywords that have not yet been added.

You can also filter results, which is really helpful for wading through long lists and getting the keywords into targeted AdGroups. The tool also lets you create a new Campaign or AdGroup shell.

You may find it useful to sort descending by Global Monthly Searches, at least initially. This should help prioritize the value of longer result sets. This deep workflow integration really helps this tool shine because you don’t have to task-switch between tools to complete the job at hand.

You may find it useful to sort-descending by Global Monthly Searches. This should help prioritize the value of longer result sets. One of the best practices we generally recommend to Clients is to push toward exact match keywords. The increased control and precision often do wonderful things for account performance.

However, our aggressive search-query harvesting and keyword expansions don’t always catch everything. This tool helps us add even more keywords on Exact Match, and it is built right in to Editor.

In this post, we will use some Excel VBA code that will help us work back and forth between this format and the regular, two column format recognized by AdWords Editor. As an example, we can add all of our existing broad match keywords as exact match so we can refine our bidding control on them. Let’s get started.

This posting format originated as a means of uploading keywords in bulk through the web interface without having to provide 2 columns for keyword and match type. So, rather than having to input something like:

red bike    broad
blue bike   phrase
fast bike   phrase
tiny bike   exact

We can instead simply encode the match type using special punctuation, like this:

red bike
"blue bike"
"fast bike"
[tiny bike]

In this style, Broad Match keywords are left as-is (no special punctuation). Note that this is the default when simply pasting a list of keywords. Be careful with Broad Match!). Broad Match Modified keywords get a “+” in front of each modified keyword (I usually tag all of them by default, but your usage may vary. Phrase Match keywords get surrounded by double-quotes. Exact Match Keywords get surrounded by brackets.

Basically, like this:

Broad Match
+Broad +Match +Modified
"Phrase Match"
[Exact Match]

Here is the current google help on the topic: http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2497836&from=6100&rd=1

To see for yourself, login to your AdWords account, navigate to the Keywords tab (hopefully, with some keywords of various match types), and click the download button.

Once you download and open in Excel, you should see something like this:

From here, if you wanted to work with those keywords and make a bulk sheet to upload to AdWords Editor, you would have to translate from that Power Posting format to regular Bulk Sheet Format. Of course, if you want to copy/paste into the web interface, you can do so, but you might find that somewhat limiting. For example, you can’t paste into multiple Campaigns or AdGroups, delete things, etc.

Let’s see if we can translate those characters into something meaningful without having to do a bunch of manual find-and-replace operations.

Here is some Excel VBA code that will do the trick:

  Option Explicit

  'COPYRIGHT: 2011 Stone Temple Consulting 
(http://www.stonetemple.com)
  'AUTHOR: Crosby Grant - cgrant@stonetemple.com
  'LICENSE: Provided under Creative Commons BY-NC license.
  'Details here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
  'Essentially: You may share or remix, 
but you must attribute the original author
(e.g.: include this entire block of text) 
and you may not use this work for commercial purposes 
(e.g.: sell it or its output).
  'WARRANTY: This code is distributed as-is, with no warranty.
  'USAGE INFORMATION: 
http://searchengineland.com/ppc-shop-tools-the-permutator-99135
  'CONTRIBUTIONS:
Code and design contributions graciously accepted.
Please contact the author directly.

  Public Function GetMatchTypeFromPowerPostKeyword

(ByVal kwd As String) As String
    Dim mt As String
    mt = ""

    If (0 = Len(kwd)) Then
      GetMatchTypeFromPowerPostKeyword = ""
      Exit Function
    Else
      If ("-" = Left(kwd, 1)) Then
        If (1 < Len(kwd)) Then
          mt = "Negative "
          kwd = Mid(kwd, 2, Len(kwd) - 1)
        End If
      End If
      If ("[" = Left(kwd, 1) And "]" = Right(kwd, 1)) Then
        kwd = Mid(kwd, 2, Len(kwd) - 2)
        GetMatchTypeFromPowerPostKeyword = mt + "Exact"
        Exit Function
      ElseIf ("""" = Left(kwd, 1) And """" = Right(kwd, 1)) Then
        kwd = Mid(kwd, 2, Len(kwd) - 2)
        GetMatchTypeFromPowerPostKeyword = mt + "Phrase"
        Exit Function
      Else
        GetMatchTypeFromPowerPostKeyword = mt + "Broad"
        Exit Function
      End If
    End If
  End Function

  Public Function GetKeywordFromPowerPostKeyword
(ByVal kwd As String) As String
    If (0 = Len(kwd)) Then
      GetKeywordFromPowerPostKeyword = ""
      Exit Function
    Else
      If ("-" = Left(kwd, 1)) Then
        If (1 < Len(kwd)) Then
          kwd = Mid(kwd, 2, Len(kwd) - 1)
        End If
      End If
      If ("[" = Left(kwd, 1) And "]" = Right(kwd, 1)) Then
        kwd = Mid(kwd, 2, Len(kwd) - 2)
        GetKeywordFromPowerPostKeyword = kwd
        Exit Function
      ElseIf ("""" = Left(kwd, 1) And """" = Right(kwd, 1)) Then
        kwd = Mid(kwd, 2, Len(kwd) - 2)
        GetKeywordFromPowerPostKeyword = kwd
        Exit Function
      Else
        GetKeywordFromPowerPostKeyword = kwd
        Exit Function
      End If
    End If
  End Function

  Public Function GetPowerPostKeyword
(ByVal kwd As String, ByVal mt As String)
    mt = Replace(LCase(mt), " match", "")
    Select Case mt
      Case "broad"
        GetPowerPostKeyword = kwd
      Case "negative broad"
        GetPowerPostKeyword = "-" & kwd
      Case "phrase"
        GetPowerPostKeyword = """" & kwd & """"
      Case "negative phrase"
        GetPowerPostKeyword = "-""" & kwd & """"
      Case "exact"
        GetPowerPostKeyword = "[" & kwd & "]"
      Case "negative exact"
        GetPowerPostKeyword = "-[" & kwd & "]"
    End Select
  End Function

If you are unfamiliar with working with VBA, here is the short version of how to make use of this:

• Open your worksheet in Excel.
• ALT-F11 (opens the VBA coding window)
• Copy/Paste the above code into the editor
• ALT-F11 (switches back to Excel)
• Save-As a Macro-Enabled Workbook
• Use the functions like any other Excel Function

Here is a nice resource to help get you started: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ee814737.aspx

Let’s get to that keyword download sheet then, shall we?

First, let’s rename the Keyword column to “Keyword.Old”. Then, insert a new column before column C, and call it “Keyword”. In this column, in cell C3, type the following formula, and then fill-down all the rows in your report.

=GetKeywordFromPowerPostKeyword($B3)

Your report should look similar to this:

Now, add insert a new column before column D, and call it “Match Type”. In this column, in cell D3, enter the following:

=GetMatchTypeFromPowerPostKeyword($B3)

Your report should now look something like this:

From here, let’s say we want to add all of our existing broad match keywords as exact match so we can refine our bidding control on them. In Excel, add a Filter to your report (ALT-A-T). Then filter the Match Type column to only show Broad.

Now, you have a few options from here, but one simple method would be to type “Exact” into the Match Type column, and copy that down for all the rows you are seeing, then copy to the clipboard.

Next, open up AdWords Editor and Add/Update Multiple Keywords (CTRL-SHIFT-K). Editor will automatically ignore the “Keyword.Old” column (and any other columns related to metrics, etc.).

Good luck out there.

At the time (I almost started with In my day…, ha), there were many different engines other than Google and Bing that were viable options for search engine marketing such as Overture, Excite, AltaVista, AskJeeves, etc.

This single value proposition of being able to perform [even basic] functionality across many different platforms more than justified the cost of the tool. It saved countless hours and tools like GoToast helped to build the thriving SEM industry to billions of dollars it is today.

To me, there are two types of paid search management features. The first kind are ones that go beyond what any single engine could provide;  GoToast’s ability to manage multiple engine campaigns from one spot is an example of this. Another is cross-engine attribution that you can find in most top tier search platforms. The ability to clone an AdWords account and apply those same campaigns to a Bing account which is also something many tools have.

The other kinds of features found in paid search tools helped to expand functionality that the engines themselves could release. Things like custom date ranges (before the engines themselves had this feature) is a good case in point.

Kenshoo’s Advanced Search and Scheduled Actions are also features that the engines could include, yet for some reason do not. For all of the great innovations that AdWords has, it boggles the mind why they wouldn’t build these things into their platform. They’re absolutely no-brainers to me.

In fact, I bet if the engines included these features into their tools, it would help search marketers optimize their workflow and actually help Google sell more search advertising!  Oh, well, at least clients of Kenshoo have these two tools at their fingertips.

Advanced Search & Scheduled Actions

Kenshoo was originally built in 2006 for the online retail space and has since expanded into many other verticals. As any search marketer who has worked with retailers knows, these campaigns can quickly become monsters. Each product can correlate to several keywords and ads, so a product feed of 100,000 products could result in a campaign with millions of keywords and ads which each need attention to be properly optimized and maintained.

Kenshoo’s founders discovered that most of the SEM management tools at the time would load the entire account and let users filter down to find the campaign elements they were looking for. The problem was that extremely large accounts would take forever to load and filter.

Kenshoo’s innovation was to (like Google) maintain a massive database of Web assets to delivers results in seconds. Advanced Search lets marketers search and find specific elements in bulk from a huge database of PPC campaigns, keywords, and ads.

Scheduled Actions is a feature released last year that lets users tag elements using Advanced Search and then program in specific activities to take place at a later time. Ariel Rosenstein, Kenshoo’s Marketing Research Director tells me, “Within the first few months of release, over 80% of our clients were actively scheduling multiple actions.”

I can certainly understand the draw. Who among us hasn’t had a need for automation in search marketing? I personally have some nightmarish stories of racing home to turn on campaigns at midnight on New Years Eve–yes this has happened more than once!

Why AdWords and AdCenter don’t have these features is beyond me. Yes, AdWords does have some dayparting features that you can rig to perform some of these basic actions but it’s not nearly as in depth as what Kenshoo offers here.

Step By Step Example

Let’s take a look how these two features are work within the platform.

Step 1. The campaign manager wants to find all the ads that contain the text Free Shipping. Each type of search ad, keyword, ad group, campaign has different parameters based on the element, but for this example she will stick with ads.

Step 2. She also wants to just affect the ads that have a CTR between one and three as the ads performing over that CTR she doesn’t want to touch and any ad below that CTR may not be worth changing.

Step 3. The search returned 47 ads which fit the search criteria. Now the campaign manager can modify the ad promotion to remind consumers that this is the last day for free shipping.

Step 4. Now all our campaign manager has to do is schedule the action. In this case, she can schedule this promotion to run on December 16^th (which is the last day for free shipping), so all potential customers will see a timely and targeted promotion.

There you have it. Couldn’t be simpler. It’s all very intuitive and any search marketers worth their AdWords certification could easily navigate through these two tools without too much trouble.

For now, the engines don’t offer this functionality. Maybe one day they will. But for now, check out Kenshoo or other paid search platforms that can take your SEM efforts to the next level.

In fact, there are crowd workers in almost two hundred countries. Alone, Amazon’s popular micro-task, crowdsourcing platform, Mechanical Turk, has almost a half million users — an argument could be made that they are the largest employer in the world!

Trada, who bills themselves as “the only performance-based paid search marketplace” has gained some fantastic momentum in the last few years. Their primary function is to match SEM advertisers with paid search specialists (called Optimizers) who work remotely to manage and optimize these companies’ paid search efforts via Trada’s centralized platform.

Through this unique approach, Trada feels this process facilitates the very best way to crack the paid search efficiency puzzle: saving advertisers time and driving down costs. It is an alternative to working with an agency or to hiring an in-house team.

I spoke with Niel Robertson, the highly entrepreneurial Founder and CEO of Trada, to learn a bit more on how this matchmaking actually works:

 The size of your team is entirely dependent on budget and other factors, but in general you can expect that we will start with a small team of experts – usually between 3 and 8 – who are specifically qualified to work on your campaign. We use an algorithm called Optimizer Matching, which collects information about the experts’ unique skillsets and their historical performance in the Trada system, and assigns them to campaigns whose objectives they can best serve. In paid search, the strategies used to achieve different goals are highly variant, so subject matter expertise in an advertiser’s vertical, size, and conversion type are critical to success.

This preliminary curation of your Optimizer team ensures the best possible performance right off the bat, and over time we may increase the number of experts on your campaign.

So how does their system work? It’s a simple concept – though there’s some deep tech involved in making it all happen. Potential Optimizers must pass a certification to be part of the platform and, when assigned to an account, build out their own ad groups, keywords, bids and strategy.

The advertiser sets a conversion cost goal which the Optimizers try to beat by building the best campaigns. Keywords and ads come to the advertiser for review, and they can approve or reject various components throughout the process and can offer feedback.

Trada puts the collective Optimizer work into a single campaign and launches it on the search networks (Google, Yahoo and Bing). The networks themselves decide which ads to run based on which are the most effectively optimized.

Any of the Optimizers working on a single campaign could now be simultaneously generating clicks and conversions with their ads, and the advertiser has the great advantage of the collective expertise of multiple search practitioners on a single account.

Each time an individual Optimizer’s work generates a conversion, she gets paid the difference between the advertiser’s conversion goal and the price she was actually able to generate the conversion for. In this model, the goals of the advertiser and his workers are perfectly aligned: everyone wants low-cost conversions!

Sound’s easy enough, right? Let’s dive into their system to see how it all works.

Here, in the Leaderboard, you can see all of the Optimizers who are working on your campaign, their performance, and their statistics. You know their real names, and you can message them for questions or feedback.

Ads come to an advertiser for review before they go live on the networks:

Trada’s algorithms ensure that an advertiser is getting the best possible price for the most conversions across networks. The Budget Split tool dynamically reallocates budget among the engines based on conversion data.

One of Trada’s most commonly asked questions is whether or not Optimizers can use the same keywords as other Optimizers. Yes, they can, and this creates an ideal situation: because the keywords are in different ad groups, connected to different ads, the engine algorithms decide from which group the keyword will be pulled from based on what is converting best. It is like having a complex testing tool designed to drive down conversion costs on individual keywords.

On the Wall, Optimizers have the opportunity to ask questions and make suggestions to the advertiser or to each other. Advertisers can also communicate new products and strategies.

Even Trada’s logo hints to crowdsourcing.  If you’ve been to any search conferences in the last few years, you’ve seen the Trada booth with the gumball machines.

We’re often asked why we have gumballs in the Trada logo. Trada was founded on the basic principle of the Wisdom of the Crowd – that a crowd of people working on a problem is collectively more effective than any one person could be working on the same problem. Harnessing the collective power of a crowd – in our case a crowd of Paid Search experts – is what makes Trada so effective for advertisers in our marketplace.

The classic example of the Wisdom of the Crowd is the gumballs-in-a-jar game where a group of people is asked to guess the number of gumballs in a jar. While the individual estimates vary widely, the averaged guess of each person in the crowd approximates the actual number of gumballs more accurately than the best individual guesser. We’ve tried the gumballs-in-a-jar game and it really works!

Cool stuff. Advertisers who find Trada’s concept intriguing may want to see how the Wisdom of the Crowd could help their business. According to Trada, the platform works best for mid-market companies and larger SMBs, who have sophisticated marketing needs (a really optimized campaign and aggressive goals) but who may not always have the time or in-house expertise to execute.

And if you’re a paid search expert and think you have the chops, you might want to consider signing up and see if you can generate some supplemental (or full time!) income on this platform.

This article demonstrates some useful ways to use regular expressions with PPC, by adding new dimensions to our typical Account/Campaign/AdGroup hierarchy of data. Another use for regular expressions would be manipulating URLs – perhaps in a future article…

First, a quick note: Getting up to speed with regular expressions in general can be a daunting adventure. There are a lot of resources online for getting started - http://www.regular-expressions.info is a good one.

While this article assumes a working knowledge of Regular expressions, the examples do work without your needing to know anything about them.

Enriching Data With Campaign & AdGroup Names

It is sometimes useful in PPC to group data together in more ways than the standard hierarchy of Account, Campaign, AdGroup, etc.

You might want to create a report that more naturally represents your business’ products, or that aggregates keyword data in unconventional ways, perhaps to help with bidding. If you are familiar with data warehousing concepts, and if you will permit me the rough comparison, we are enriching our data with dimensions.

As an example, consider a bike store that has 3 different Campaigns selling Mountain Bikes, a few selling Road Bikes, some Brand Campaigns, and some others. It could be useful to alter a standard Campaign Performance report that has one row per campaign, to instead have one row for each product, brand, and other.

Similarly, you could aggregate based on Account or AdGroup names, provided you plan ahead and use a naming convention that will prove useful.

Use A Strong Naming Convention

In order to use this technique, use a strong naming convention that is readily parsed by regular expressions. The examples above use my recommended naming convention, which basically looks like this:

{Dimension}({Value}), e.g.: Product(Road Bike)

That is: a {Dimension} name that we will use to name the new dimension in our data, followed by a {Value} for each of the different values in that dimension, wrapped in parenthesis. One implied rule is that {Value} should not contain any parenthesis.

In practice, avoiding any special characters is a good idea, regardless.

Considering our bicycle vendor, let’s look at those Campaign Names:

• Product(Road Bike)
• Product(Road Bike) Distribution(Content)
• Product(Mountain Bike)
• Product(Mountain Bike) Distribution(Content)
• Brand(ACME Bikes)
• Product(Other)
• …

We have defined 3 new dimensions:

• Product
• Brand
• Distribution

Create additional dimensions by adding them to your Campaign naming convention. Device(Mobile) might be a good one, or perhaps geography, as in State(CA), etc.

The “Product” dimension currently has 3 members:

• Road Bike
• Mountain Bike
• Other

Likewise, each of the other dimensions has its members. Add members by simply filling in the new value in a campaign. In this example, there might also be: Product(Tire), Product(Helmet), etc.

You could of course use something other than parenthesis to delimit your {Member} values, and you could use something other than a space to separate {Dimension}({Member}) pairs.

Some examples come to mind:

• product=road bike&distribution=content
• product:road bike|distribution:content
• etc.

Personally, I find the Product(Road Bike) convention to be easily human-readable, and suitably robust to meet our needs for machine-parsing with regular expressions.

Now that we have rigorously-named Campaigns and AdGroups, how do we make use of that in a robust and scalable way? The simple way is to use filter functionality.

Using Filter Functionality With Our New Naming Convention

With your new naming convention in place, you can immediately start using filters in your reporting. This works online in the web UI, as well as with Excel, and probably with whatever reporting tool you are already using.

By carefully using your delimiters, you can get exactly what you want. For example, to get all Campaigns that sell products, filter for “Product(” (without the quotes).

Notice I included the delimiter – the opening parenthesis. This will help avoid inadvertently including something unexpected, like Brand(ACME Products).

Using filters is nice, but what about robust reporting, or combining multiple dimensions in creative ways? We are going to use regular expressions, of course.

Extracting Dimensions With Regular Expressions

Here is a regular expression we can use to extract a specific dimension’s member-value from our recommended naming convention:

Product\(([^\)]+)\)

Or, more generally, replace {Dimension} with the name of the dimension in the following:

{Dimension}\(([^\)]+)\)

Note: These examples use the Microsoft regular expression implementation. Other conventions, as with PERL, POSIX, etc., will of course require adjustments to get the expected results.

Now let’s try to use that in Excel. Wait, Excel doesn’t do regular expressions…

Teach Excel How To Use Regular Expressions

The easiest way – use these macros can be downloaded in a working example spreadsheet here: PPC Tools – Regular Expressions Examples.

Excel does not ship with any regular expression functionality, but it is added easily enough through macros.

Here is one working version:

Function RegExReplace(ReplaceIn, _
        ReplaceWhat As String, ReplaceWith As String)
    #If Not LateBind Then
      Dim re As RegExp
      Set re = New RegExp
    #Else
      Dim re As Object
      Set re = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")
    #End If
    re.Pattern = ReplaceWhat
    re.Global = True
    RegExReplace = re.Replace(ReplaceIn, ReplaceWith)
End Function

Function RegExFind(FindIn, FindWhat As String, Optional Match As
Integer = 0,
Optional SubMatch As Integer = 0, _ Optional IgnoreCase As
Boolean = False)
    Dim i As Long
    Dim rslt As String

    #If Not LateBind Then
    Dim re As RegExp, allMatches As MatchCollection, aMatch As Match
    Set re = New RegExp

    #Else
      Dim re As Object, allMatches As Object, aMatch As Object
      Set re = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")
    #End If
    re.Pattern = FindWhat
    re.IgnoreCase = IgnoreCase
    re.Global = True
    Set allMatches = re.Execute(FindIn)
    Set aMatch = allMatches(Match)
    RegExFind = aMatch.SubMatches(SubMatch)
End Function

To add these to an Excel file, here are the quick steps:

• Be sure you have a macro-enabled file. (hint: Save As Excel Macro-Enabled Workbook)
• Alt-F11 (this opens the VBA coding window)
• Paste the macros into a module (the default window should work).
• Alt-F11 (this should bring you back to regular Excel

Save

You may also want to deal with setting Excel options to permit macros to run next time you open Excel. Here are good instructions from Microsoft for how to Enable or Disable macros in Office files.

Extract Dimensions & Members Using Regular Expressions

Now we can ask Excel to help us extract those member names.

Here is the magic formula (Assuming Campaign Name is in column A, and Dimension Name is the column B header, in row 10)

=IFERROR(regexfind($A11,B$10&"\(([^\)]+)\)"),"")

The formula looks in the column header to get the dimension name, then looks in the Campaign Name to get the member value. If it doesn’t find anything, it returns a blank. Simply add the dimension name to each successive column, and copy/paste the formula.

Pivot On Your New Dimensions

Here is the culmination of our efforts. We can now pull together a report that aggregates based on Product (rather than just Campaign Name, for example).

What tips do you have to utilize Excel to better manage your search marketing efforts?

As an Excel add-in, it offers powerful API-based access to data, right in the familiar Excel environment. Version 8 includes some usability improvements, better Excel integration, improved keyword suggestions and insights, and perhaps most importantly – a new template-based system with community support.

My Take: It seems like you can’t throw a cat without hitting a new adCenter feature these days. (No animals were harmed in testing this theory.) I just finished a getting started article on the old version of MAI last month! We ended that article hoping for community templates and mobile device data – we got it!

adCenter is alone in offering this type of marketplace data in a desktop software tool. Google AdWords doesn’t offer one. Their related offerings are Web-based, and adCenter offers additional features and data that simply is not available on the AdWords network.

With MAI, we can build business processes around automated spreadsheets, which could greatly improve the adoption of the adCenter marketing platform by making it easier to get great, actionable data.

I had a chance to catch up with Amit Goel, a Product Manager on the team responsible for MAI.

“One of the key values of Microsoft Ad Intelligence is its ability to operate seamlessly in Excel which of course enables you to benefit from the excel-based features commonly used by SEMs. Plus, we are really excited to introduce the templates to our advertisers. We hope they can benefit from this upgrade by using templates to save time manual tasks. Increasing our Advertisers’ Return on Time Spent is a big push for us.”

My Take: I’ve been working in Excel-based tools doing PPC for almost a decade now. I eagerly anticipate the day when these tools make my account-specific data available. But the current functionality gives us lots to explore. For example, I can imagine automating the expansion of core keywords from limited input, as with starting up a new account.

Amit Goel: Currently MAI is account agnostic. In the future we will be including advertiser context i.e. account specific data in MAI. Our goal is to have advertisers perform keyword research based on their account information and directly sync their data to adCenter platform from Excel.”

My Take: Sweet!

Templates & Community Support

The new version of MAI supports templates. You can save your reports to a template and develop your own custom, repeatable keyword research workflow.

Join the online discussion at Microsoft Advertising Intelligence 8.0 (MAI 8.0): Templates and Best Practices

My Take: The Community Templates have so much potential. I’m eagerly looking forward to what we come up with as a community. One of the templates that is available today from the AdCenter team is a Twitter template that helps Advertisers find keywords from tweets happening near a specific location. The mashup potential is really great!

Now, With Mobile!

The latest version of MAI includes device-based data. Advertisers can customize results to include any combination of “Desktops and laptops,” “Smart phones” and “Non-smart phones.”

My Take: If you haven’t already heard, mobile is coming. At this point in the game, PPC tools need to be Device-Aware, and it is good to see adCenter catching the details.

Quick Tour

• Download Microsoft Advertising Intelligence – a Free downloadable add-in for Excel
• Note: v8 does not update the previous version. Uninstall the old version using Windows&squot; Add/Remove Programs Control Panel.)
• The new version, v8, will auto-update going forward.
• Once installed, launch Excel. Notice the new “Ad Intelligence 8.0″ tab with a ribbon bar full of tools!

Keyword Suggestions

• Webpage Keywords: Generate keywords from a list of URLs.

• Aggregate Keywords: This is the core research tool. Feed it a list and get keyword suggestions.

• Searches With Your Keyword: Submit a list, and get back search queries that contain your keyword.

• Associated Keywords: This is the Keyword Ninja – find related keywords that other Advertisers are bidding on. (This is not SpyFu.com. They won’t share who, and you can’t filter the results to spy on your competitors.)

• Related Searches: Bing “Related Searches” results.

Keyword Analysis: Traffic & Performance

• Traffic: Search Volume

• Keyword Categories: Generates a list of keywords along with their Business Categories

• Search-User Location: Top locations where searches originated from (configure a country)

• Age Group & Gender: Break out Search Volume by Age & Gender over the last 30 days

• Keyword Performance: Impressions, Clicks, CTR, CPC, etc. (tip: default is aggregate, try configuring a position.)

• Bid Estimation: Bid suggestions and expected performance (tip: configure position and match type).

Configure The Output

Each tool on the ribbon has configurable output. The Excel integration is tight here. Advertisers can point the settings to read from specific cells, such as the keywords to feed into the tool, the match types to use, the positions to use for performance data, etc.

API Access

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

Quota

In previous versions, it was possible to reach Quota and get blocked from access for the rest of the day. This has been explicitly addressed in this version should not be an issue.

Resources

• Download Microsoft Advertising Intelligence

So, wouldn’t you think that after more than a decade of search marketing and literally tens of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone in paid search ad revenue, that someone would come along and actually build a powerful keyword generation tool?

Yes, there have been attempts in the past, and there are some handy tools out on the market today, but the general consensus with most search marketers is that these platforms are not all-inclusive.

They are simply pieces that still need much more manual manipulation to build stand alone keyword lists and groups. For our own clients, my team and I manually aggregate multiple keyword tools in order to put together what we feel is the most comprehensive list available.

Well, there’s a new player in the market. Billing themselves as “the world’s most intelligent keyword and categorization platform”, the Chicago-based technology vendor, Zenya, feels they have cracked the puzzle.

I met their founder and CEO, Stephen Scarr, a little over a month ago at an industry event put on by Marin Software. Talk about passion! Stephen could barely contain his excitement for what he believes is the best keyword building tool on the market. (Note: he is also one of the brains behind Info.com which he co-founded in 1999.)

Zenya has spent the last three years developing a sophisticated system of categorization that maps searcher intent of more than 600 million categorized keywords and growing.

Zenya’s first dedicated team included taxonomists, subject-matter experts, and structured data analysts who collaborated to build an entirely new taxonomy from scratch, one designed to cater to the unique needs of online advertising. Today, Zenya’s categorization algorithm can process more than ten thousands keywords every second with a database of over 1.4 billion keywords.

“Overwhelming demand for a better way to identify productive keywords led us to develop Zenya,” Stephen avidly explains. “Since the inception of search engine marketing, advertisers have constantly struggled with the time-consuming and arduous process of keyword research. Using available keywords tools, marketers spend countless hours identifying relevant keywords to create Ad campaigns of tightly themed categories (topics).”

To assist digital marketers, info.com conceived Zenya to create the world’s first repository of categorized keywords, making the keyword building task that could last days or weeks, take just minutes.”

The folks at Zenya believe there are three core values that search marketers will discover with their product:

1. To Save Time. Rather than spending weeks creating keyword lists, marketers can download thousands of relevant keywords in seconds.
2. To Gain Control. Using the category tree or advanced filters, Zenya customers can constrain and focus their results to pinpoint relevant intent and connect with customers.
3. To Achieve Insight. Marketers can make sense of unstructured keyword data and categorize entire keyword portfolios into more than 250,000 categories.

Sound good?  Well, let’s take a closer look at the product.

Take a look at the filters available for the current search of men’s shoes. You can exclude different things such as adult terms and branded terms or add your own minus (negative) ones. You can filter by category, intent, language, etc.

One of the more interesting filters is user intent. Zenya’s advanced categorization allows users to zero in on the types of terms that demonstrate various levels of the purchase funnel.

Categorical analysis is also very crucial to proper paid search. Using the categorical filters, users can better groups their keywords and develop granular messaging. Check out the keyword and category matches for the query cellphone plans.

Zenya has a variable pricing plan based on a points system. Users can opt-in at various levels to meet their needs.

Needless to say, Zenya is new to market and definitely has room to grow. For example, currently available as a consulting service, another feature in development is an automated gap analysis. This enables marketers to map their keywords sets to Zenya’s taxonomy of more than 250,000 categories and then source additional keywords in these categories as method of efficient campaign expansion.

As the paid search industry grows, so do the opportunities for vendors to garner budgetary dollars. Zenya is another platform that search pros should do their homework on and see if it should be another tool to add to their SEM toolbox.