Microsoft Advertising Intelligence More Information Overall Rating: Not Rated Pay Per Click Universe Recommends: AdWatcher - 100% Click Fraud Protection. Concerned about click fraud? Protect your online advertising dollars with the world's most trusted & accurate click fraud solution on the market today. AdWatcher will put a stop to competitors and fraudsters who are looking to drain your hard earned advertising budget. Test-Drive AdWatcher For FREE For 30 Days! The Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool had its origins in a tool that functioned in beta mode for some time called the adCenter Add-In for Excel, which debuted early in 2008. Although Microsoft wasn't always the one in the trio of dominant search engines that first came to mind when one thought of great PPC offerings to help users administer their campaigns, much has changed since the debut of Bing and the news of the Yahoo/Microsoft alliance. Behind its rather bland exterior, the tool is far from blah. It operates within the Microsoft Office Excel 2007 program, so you must have that program in order to install Advertising Intelligence. Its primary purpose is to help you research keyword and keyword combinations and to optimize keyword lists using geographic and historical search-related information. To help with this, there are a large number of functions and features built into the add-in to help with various aspects of search marketing and optimization related to keywords. Estimates of the number of search queries involving specific keywords can be produced to help discover geographic patterns, as well as monthly and daily traffic amounts. Content impressions by month are also available for the content network. Typical search volume for keywords in your list or those you are thinking of adding are available for the previous 12 months There is a Keyword Wizard available to help you develop appropriate keywords. Using either your initial ideas or ones taken from a specific web page, it accesses search history and other campaigns to come up with the number of keywords you may be interested in. You can then check the KPIs of the suggested keywords for ones you would like to integrate into your campaign. Using specific functions, you can drill down further into the data. For example, you can work on finessing bidding strategies by looking at pricing data for different positions for specific keywords, not just the average price per click. KPIs for different business verticals are also available to help users judge how well a specific business is performing. As well, keywords can be assessed in terms of ROI-related factors within a certain time period. Included in this are estimates about number of clicks, CTR, impressions, and cost per click. Key performance indicators for certain verticals are also available. Traffic forecasting is available for 3 months forward from the current date, in addition to historical presentations of keyword searches on either monthly or daily basis. Keep in mind that numbers for traffic may differ from those projected from other data such as impressions, resulting in numbers that don't match within different parameters or with Microsoft adCenter reports or other analytics reports. The attachment with Excel makes it easy to manipulate large spreadsheets full of keyword data. A toolbar comes with the program, giving you easy access to commands. Integrated with your adCenter account, one can set quite a number of parameters involved in the underlying algorithms to adjust the data stream to fit your needs more closely. Adjustments can then be set as the ongoing default if desired. Overall, Microsoft Advertising Intelligence is a great collection of keyword-related research tools. Although one needs to open an adCenter account and have Excel installed in order to access even the most basic of its functions, if you're involved in PPC campaigns online, it's well worth doing so in order to view a different angle on keyword research. |
