My team went for a tutorial in London last week on making AdCenter work. I thought the notes that they came back with as to what they found relevent might be of help to people - especially those that suddenly find their ads in limbo, offline or entirely ineffectual. Thanks to my team for giving me the meat of this post...

Editorial Process
When you Submit keywords and ads, they go through an EVP (Editorial Verification Process). This process can result in one of three outcomes: Rejected, Approval, Pending

Acceptance Policy
(sidebar... interesting it is called an "acceptance policy, not a rejection policy. Implies that ads need to reach a quality threshold before being accepted)

There should be:
• Strong relevancy, flow between keywords, ads and landing page
• Site must be stable and respond at peak times
• No sites under construction allowed
• No pop up’s or mouse trapping
• No excessive Punctuation
• Spelling and grammar
• No use of “Click here”!
• Abbreviations are allowed
• Deep links best

Trademarks
Third party trademarks that are not relevant to business is not allowed

Some Basic Tips:
• Keyword relevancy
• Landing pages work
• Include keywords in titles
• use adlab.microsoft.com – keyword tool

Improving Your Campaign Management
• Bid price affects Positions and spend
• Dynamic elements allow change of copy without loss of CTR history, keeps copy clean, copy to be more relevant to search term. This is set at keyword level {param2} + {param3}. Can set Dynamic Text for each keyword. Change at keyword level where you change match type.
• Targeting – Display to right market, relevant ads, improve CTR, ROI and reduces CPA.
• Research - Identifies and suggests new keywords, volume data, tailor ad to right audience (Age and gender stats available).
• Adding Keywords – Keeps account up to date. IO available for download.

Demographics
You are able to increase bids up to 100% for people in specific categories (ie males aged 25 to 35). You can’t only bid on these categories though, your ad still shows to everyone, but the idea of this is if you know males aged 25 to 35 for example convert better, you can increase your bid for people that fall in that category for your ad to appear higher. Demographics gets data from passports when you sign up to MSN (ie email account, messenger). You can run a Demographics report in your campaign to find out who clicks through to your site (ie females aged 50 to 70 may be the most popular).

Reporting
Three main types available: Delivery, Billing+Budget and Targeting
(Scheduling reports available by email).

Developments to expect Next year
• Behavioural targeting being researched
• Adcenter Accreditation (level grading)
• Management on campaigns
• Doing a photo version of Google Earth it seems. Not sure if this will be ready next year but it ables you to search your photo and find other people’s photos of that same object (ie Tower Bridge) which can even have a 3D map of it.

Dixon.