NicheBlaster.com

After looking over the last to posts in this series, I realized that my naming convention was a bit dumb – at least from an SEO standpoint. So I decided to tweak it slightly for a bit more variation. I’m still not too happy with it, but the heck with it for now. Let’s get on to the next part, which while rather basic, is still pretty important and should not be glossed over.

I recall being on a Webinar a few years ago where the guest was an AdWords employee. All I really remember from that Webinar now is how the AdWords gal kept repeating over and over how important it was to have a “well-structured account”. From what I could tell this encompassed everything from the account level on down through campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads. We’ve had the thing about relevancy also pounded into our skulls by Google that many advertisers adopted the one keyword per ad group method. This always struck my as sort of backwards. It seemed more logical to start out with a tight group of keywords and then prune it down until you approached a single keyword ad group. But this is all rather moot now as most advertisers I know have been kicked out of the AdWords program for all eternity.

So fuck Google. We’re talking about MSN adCenter here. Unfortunately, the tendency is to take all that hard-won knowledge and experience from AdWords and attempt to apply it to MSN adCenter. On the surface they may appear to be very much the same, but in reality, they are quite different in many respects.

Whereas, with AdWords, the account structuring is done pretty much just to appease Google, with adCenter, you should do it to protect and benefit your own interests.

Budget and Ad Delivery Settings

Budget settings can be a double-edged sword: you want to protect yourself in the event that a single keyword or ad group suddenly catches fire and leaves you with a 4-digit ad spend the day your campaign goes live, but you also don’t want to be running with the brakes on and limit the number of potential impressions for a campaign. Since the traffic volume on adCenter is perceived to be extremely low, the tendency is to set a very high budget – either on a daily or monthly basis and set the delivery to “spend until depleted”.

I think it really comes down to how much time you’re willing to devote to babysitting a newly launched campaign. I know that I spend too much time watching my tracking stats waiting for the clicks to start registering. Perhaps the best approach is to initially set your budget so that your daily maximum spend works out to something you can tolerate. And by that, I mean the most you’re willing to completely lose in a single day (no conversions). I usually start with a daily budget setting for this.

Then once your campaign has run long enough for you to gauge the general traffic volume and CR for whatever it is you’re promoting, then you can be a little bolder and switch over to a high monthly budget set to be spent until depleted. I realize that this sounds scary, but you’ll be going in with a solid idea of what your average daily spend is and again, remember, we’re just talking about the adCenter Search Network here. The Content Network is much trickier and hence much more dangerous with regards to several things.

Targeted Devices

I always set my campaigns to target just PCs and laptops. I don’t want my ads displayed on mobile devices and tablets, though getting mobile traffic from adCenter Search is about next to impossible, so this setting probably doesn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.

Geo-Targeting

This should be fairly obvious, but I’m still amazed at advertisers who leave the default setting for this which is the entire freakin’ world. What’s even more screwed up about MSN’s global delivery, is that outside of the US and Canada, there doesn’t seem to be much search volume save for perhaps Asia, The Middle East, and India and Pakistan. Now imagine the click volume and quality of those clicks if you left your campaign at the default setting. I’ve seen more than one advertiser lament that he was out hundreds of dollars with zippo conversions when having done this. Hopefully, you’re not that dumb.

Keyword Segmentation and Ad Groups

For MSN adCenter Search campaigns, I’m not all that fussy about getting overly relevant with my keyword segmentation. No where near as fussy as on Google AdWords. I also don’t use all that many keywords either so that limits the number of ad groups. I use the keyword building techniques that I discussed in parts 1 and 2 of this series and leave it at that.

These are the basic settings when first creating an adCenter Search Network campaign. Other components such as ads and tracking will be left for other posts.