Tag: Microsoft

How to Optimize Microsoft AdCenter for More Effective Paid Campaigns

Gaining paid search footholds can be challenging, and once you’ve built a successful Google Ads campaign and watched it perform, it can be disheartening to reach the end of that campaign’s lifespan.

However, it doesn’t have to end there.

An excellent strategy for expanding the success of your PPC campaigns is to look beyond Google Ads to other platforms like Microsoft AdCenter, which allows you to advertise on Bing, Yahoo!, and other affiliate platforms.

It’s simple to translate your Google Ads campaign to the Microsoft platform because they have similar functionality. Using the same fundamental best practices, you can create more leads through PPC on an entirely new platform.

What Is Microsoft AdCenter?

Microsoft AdCenter is the centralized hub where advertisers go to buy sponsored ads on Bing or Yahoo!

Previously Bing Ads, the platform underwent a rebrand after combining forces with Yahoo!

While it’s safe to say that the majority of internet search traffic comes through Google, that doesn’t mean digital marketers should be sleeping on Microsoft AdCenter.

In fact, with a combined 30 percent market share of the internet’s search function, you’re going to want to add a visit to Microsoft AdCenter to your digital marketing itinerary.

Benefits of Optimizing Microsoft AdCenter for Your Ad Campaigns

Whenever you’re running a PPC campaign, you want to be constantly optimizing.

Why?

When you recalibrate through optimization, you increase your chances of reaching your target audience. This practice will not only increase your overall revenue but will also decrease your ad spend.

Microsoft AdCenter is no different. You want to continuously optimize your campaigns for success. While there’s much work to be done before launching a campaign, it’s arguable that the most valuable work is done post-launch.

With 1.03 billion unique users each month, Bing offers advertisers extensive reach.

However, without optimizing your campaigns, how can you ensure you’re reaching the right audience members?

Short answer: You can’t, which is why understanding how to optimize in Microsoft AdCenter is vitally important to your success on the platform.

Difference Between Microsoft AdCenter and Google Ads

As mentioned above, Microsoft AdCenter has similar functionality to Google Ads. However, the two PPC platforms differ greatly in five key areas: campaign-level control, closed variants, engagement rates, search partner targeting options, and ad scheduling.

Campaign-Level Control

Google Ads requires users to set the language, ad rotation, network, ad scheduling, and location settings at the campaign level. Groups are then restricted to these settings.

On the other hand, Microsoft AdCenter opens these options at the ad group level, permitting users to easily make change settings at any time, rather than having to build an entirely new campaign.

Closed Variants

After eliminating exact and phrase match keywords by enforcing a “close variant” target within Google Ads, the reach of exact and phrase keywords extended by 7 percent, including misspellings, pluralized terms, and grammatical iterations.

While Microsoft AdCenter does have an option to use the close variant query, it is just that: optional.

Increased Engagement and Conversion Rates

Users who engage with Microsoft AdCenter PPC ads have increased engagement with the selected sites and landing pages.

In fact, studies found that automotive search users who interacted with Microsoft AdCenter content had conversation rates 10-56 percent higher than Google Ads.

While this is clearly a particular audience subset, it is still indicative of increased interaction overall.

In addition to these factors, another difference emerges between Google Ads and Microsoft AdCenter.

As we discussed above, it’s simple to import your Google Ads campaign into Microsoft AdCenter. Despite this ease, there are considerable differences to keep in mind as you optimize your campaigns on each respective platform, including:

  • search partner targeting options
  • ad scheduling

While both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads have search partner networks (external sites that permit advertisers to expand reach on their platforms), the networks are notably different.

Search Partner Targeting Options

Unsurprisingly, Google boasts hundreds of sites in their search partner network. If you’re not seeing big returns on including this extended network in your targeted campaign, you can remove the function. Unfortunately, that removal is all or nothing—you can’t cherry-pick which partners you’d like to reach.

With Microsoft Ads, however, you can select which partners to reach, a key difference as you optimize your campaigns.

Ad Scheduling

While ad scheduling is a key component of any PPC campaign, different parameters for setting ad schedules apply when transitioning your Google Ads strategy to Microsoft.

With Google Ads, dashboard time is automatically set to the time selected upon account creation, so users need to update scheduled times depending on the time zone they’re trying to reach.

Microsoft Ads, however, allows users to set schedules based on the location of the target, making scheduling infinitely easier.

While these differences may not seem huge, they’re important to note as you begin your Microsoft AdCenter campaign.

Tips for Optimizing Microsoft AdCenter

We’ve already highlighted the importance of optimization; now it’s time to break down exactly how to optimize your Microsoft AdCenter campaigns.

1. Perform Keyword Research

If you don’t have a solid grasp on your keywords, now’s the time to start. By researching what terms apply to your purpose and audience, you can incorporate that language into your campaigns to ensure you’re reaching your desired audience.

2. Use Negative Keywords

When you include negative keywords in your campaign, you can exclude confusing or irrelevant terms from your strategy. This allows more accurate audience reach as well as reduced ad spend due to more precise matching.

3. Segment Your Campaigns

For data-driven PPC advertisers, segmenting campaigns into ad groups will allow you to make more intelligent optimization decisions. Segmentation lets marketers focus their message on different groups, which enables the collection of targeted metrics. Through a more segmented audience, you can tailor the message and receiver.

4. Use Ad Extensions

With ad extensions, you can add additional pieces of information about your business, including phone number, address, or a particular link. These free-to-add options can increase the visibility and utility of your ads.

5. Follow Ad Writing Best Practices

Strong, relevant copy is vital to the success of any PPC campaign. As you optimize your Microsoft AdCenter content, keep these best practices in mind:

  • Underscore the audience’s primary pain point: By speaking toward your audience’s primary pain point, you not only establish how you can solve their pain; you also establish that you understand their pain. This builds trust and connection between the advertiser and consumer.
  • Incorporate numbers or statistics: Historically, numbers work to grab reader attention. This was true long before the internet and will continue to be true as the internet evolves.
  • Utilize emotional triggers: It’s no secret that people react to emotional triggers. When you harness the power of emotion in your ads, you can almost guarantee a reaction from your audience. Check out how this law firm used emotion to advertise its services:
microsoft adcenter emotional ppc ad

6. Adjust Audience Type

Microsoft Ads provides users with several different types of audiences to use to ensure your ads reach the right group. You can adjust the type of audience to optimize your campaign and improve your reach.

7. Experiment With Dynamic Search Ads

These ads will automatically target relevant search queries formed from your website content. The ads are then dynamically created to react to those custom queries, reducing workload and increasing audience reach.

8. Use the Microsoft Audience Network

This audience marketing solution draws on Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) to better target your ideal audience. Be sure to take advantage of this Microsoft-exclusive offering, as it can drastically boost ad performance.

9. Use Universal Event Tracking (UET)

Yet another Microsoft-exclusive solution, you can use UET to view customer behavior after they interact with your ad. By placing a UET tag across your website, Microsoft gathers data that tracks goals and audiences with remarketing lists.

10. Set up Conversion Tracking

By setting up conversion tracking in Microsoft AdCenter, the platform matches you with relevant searchers across the Microsoft network. Conversion tracking also provides tools to optimize your campaigns for success.

Measuring the Success of Your Microsoft AdCenter Campaign

You’ve optimized your campaign throughout its lifespan, and now you want to know if it should be deemed a success or a failure.

Below, we break down three key metrics that will highlight your campaign’s overall performance.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

This metric is key to understanding whether your ads are relevant to your customers. CTR is determined by dividing the number of clicks your ad receives by the number of times your ad is shown.

Conversion Rate

Strong conversion rates indicate that what you spend on clicks is returning to you in profits. This metric is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of total ad interactions tracked to a conversion in a given time period.

Cost Per Conversion

If you’re overpaying for conversions, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. This metric is determined by dividing the total cost for clicks by the number of conversions.

These three metrics provide a strong, foundational assessment of your campaign’s performance. While you can get lost in the intricacies of data, these figures always provide a clear result.

Examples of Great Microsoft AdCenter Campaigns

Although Microsoft AdCenter is filled with examples of great PPC advertising, here are three excellent PPC ads that used a unique feature of the platform for a successful campaign.

Maybelline

Maybelline uses a detailed breakdown in their paid listing to allow searchers to find exactly what they need. By segmenting by eyes, lips, mascara, and face makeup, the beauty company increases the likelihood that the searcher with clear intent will readily find what they need.

microsoft ad center - maybelline search

From You Flowers

These product ads rely on visuals to interest the searcher. By placing product images, pricing, and information along the side of the page, searchers have all the information they need instantly.

microsoft adcenter - from you flowers grid ad

Papa John’s

Ad extensions can go a long way for PPC ads. Pizza vendor Papa John’s made their listing as informative as possible, while also touting their success and visibility by sharing the number of monthly site visitors. This strategy not only provides helpful information like deals and pizza type options, but it also increases consumer trust through the sheer number of social visitors.

microsoft adcenter - papa john's visitor extension

While all three of these ads use extensions in very different ways, they bring more texture to the search engine results page (SERP), engaging the audience through images, increasing the immediacy of search success, and building consumer trust.

Conclusion

While both Google Ads and Microsoft AdCenter offer similar functionality, the options to optimize in Microsoft AdCenter are completely different.

Be sure to take advantage of Microsoft’s unique offerings and optimize your content and strategy through the Microsoft lens, ensuring that you get the most bang out of your advertising buck.

As you become more familiar with Microsoft AdCenter’s features, you could see your success rate rise as you optimize for target audience reach.

If you’re ready to find an agency partner to help you kickstart your paid campaign on Microsoft’s ad platform, let us know!

What’s the best Microsoft AdCenter campaign you’ve ever seen?

How to Set Up Microsoft Bing Shopping Campaigns for E-Commerce Businesses

Google may lead the search engine ranks, but they’re not the only player in the game.

Bing holds 11.22% of the global search engine market share. Compared to Google’s 72.94%, that may not seem like much — but with upwards of a third of US desktop searches coming from Bing (and Bing-backed AOL and Yahoo), it’s pretty huge.

For ecommerce businesses, that makes Microsoft Shopping Campaigns (formally known as Bing shopping campaigns) a killer opportunity to boost your bottom line.

NOTE: Bing now refers to all platforms related to their shopping ads by the Microsoft name. For example, what was once called the “Bing Merchant Center” is now the “Microsoft Merchant Center.”

Bing Does Not Equal Google, but That Could Be a Good Thing

Long story short: Your paid media strategy deserves diversification, and Bing is the place to find it.

Why?

Because Bing offers unique demographics you may not be able to target from Google Ads.

More than 70% of Bing users are over the age of 35. At the same time, nearly 40% of Bing users have a six-figure annual household income. The company reports a good chunk of their user base comes from the South Atlantic region of the US (which includes various states from Delaware to Florida, plus Washington DC) — but they also have a stronghold across North America, Latin America, China, and more. 

If you are looking for high earners in a particular region, Bing could be your gateway into a lucrative ecommerce market.

Bing has some other perks too, like:

  • Affordable cost-per-click: Bing competition is significantly less than Google, with one ReportGarden study sharing the average cost-per-click for Bing Ads is just $7.99, while the average Google Ads cost-per-click costs more than $20. Of course, this depends on the industry — but a 250% price increase is nothing to ignore. 
  • User-friendly design: You don’t have to be a digital marketing pro to use Bing Shopping (though you may feel like one after you’re all set up.) You can easily craft ecommerce ad campaigns across platforms (Google included) to reach a wider audience.
  • Targeting differentiation: On Bing, you can target the device (desktop, smartphone, or tablet), operating system, timezone, and more. (Google allows similar targeting, but the options are far more limited.) 
  • An in with major websites: AOL and Yahoo both use Bing to power their search engines. This benefit provides Bing shopping marketers with a combined 700+ million unique monthly visitors from these two websites alone. Additionally, Amazon’s Alexa currently uses Bing for web searches.

When used in tandem with Google Ads, Bing can diversify your paid media campaigns for all kinds of ecommerce products. 

For more information about paid shopping and product campaigns, check out this video and the eCommerce Unlocked series on my YouTube channel:

How Does Bing Shopping Work?

When a user searches a branded or non-branded keyword on Bing, they’ll receive a grid of shopping results from various ecommerce platforms, which are usually from big ecommerce giants like Amazon and small businesses with compelling offers and inventory.

If the user has their location tracking turned on, Bing will refine the results by adding products they can find locally.

example of a bing shopping campaign ad -- How to Setup Microsoft Bing Shopping Campaigns for Ecommerce Businesses

Bing “hiking boots” search query

Depending on your layout, these ads might show up as a vertical grid on the SERP’s right-hand side.

As an ecommerce marketer, your Bing shopping campaigns can give you valuable real estate above the fold.

And it may just put you in contact with a whole new audience while you’re at it.

How to Set Up Your Bing Shopping Campaigns

First things first: Create your Microsoft Merchant Center account. 

You can do this by logging onto your Microsoft Ads (formerly known as Bing Ads) account, click the “Microsoft Merchant Center” button, and create an account. You’ll need to verify your store with a destination URL, which may take up to 48 hours.

set up bing microsoft shopping account

Once that’s done, follow the steps below. 

Create an Up-To-Date Shopping Catalog

A shopping catalog (or shopping feed) is where your products live. You can either import your existing shopping feed from Google Merchant Center or create a brand new one. You can upload any new catalogs to your Microsoft Merchant Center.

Import ecommerce product feed into microsoft bing merchant center account

When creating a new feed, don’t forget to set up all of your product attributes.

There are mandatory product attributes (like title, link, price, description, product identifiers, and more), but there are also some optional ones (like color, gender, material, and size).

Add as many as you can because this info helps you connect with users in your target audience. That will help improve your conversion rates —  which is always a good thing.

Create an Audience

Creating a custom audience tells Microsoft and Bing who you want to reach. Aim to create a narrow audience, so you don’t waste ad spend on people outside your target audience.

On your Microsoft Advertising account, head to “Shared Library.” Under the audience header, you’ll click “View Audiences.” This section is where you can lay out your ad’s plan of action once it’s live.

Create a Campaign

From your Microsoft Merchant Center, click Create Campaign. Then click Sell Products.

You’ll adjust your campaign settings, like setting priority levels for each of your Bing shopping campaigns.

Priority levels can be high, medium, or low. The higher priority campaigns take precedence, so set your important campaigns with a bigger budget on high priority while leaving your runner-ups on medium or low.

Organize Your Product Groups

You can organize based on various attributes you’ve given to each product. This feature helps with targeting.

Turn on Automatic Item Updates

This option ensures your ad prices always reflect your website prices, and you’re not advertising products that you’ve already sold. A new consumer isn’t going to give your shop a second look if prices are off or you’re promoting out of stock items.

Instant updates also help you avoid wasting your budget. 

Use Custom Labels to Streamline Audience Targeting

Head to the “Labels” on your product feed in your campaign editor. You can organize campaigns, keywords, ad groups, and ads in a way that works for you.

While it won’t directly impact your Bing ads, this does help you better analyze your campaigns and improve future targeting. That can boost future campaigns and help you optimize existing ones.

Need a more hands-on guide? Microsoft has a training course for newbies.

Tips and Plugins to Optimize Your Bing Campaigns

Why settle for average when your ecommerce shop can run the Bing shopping game?

Try these tips and tricks to optimize your Bing ad campaigns and maximize your ad dollars. You can also view my free PDF of Bing Ads resources.

Import Google Ads to Bing Shopping Campaigns

It may seem like magic, but you can import your shopping campaigns to Bing straight from Google Ads.

All you have to do is make sure your website is set up on an ecommerce platform (think Shopify and the like.) Then, ensure your Google Ads shopping feed and campaign are up and running.

Once you create your Microsoft Merchant Center store and verify it, you can import your campaign using Microsoft’s Google Merchant Center (GMC) Import tool.

import google shopping campaign into microsoft bing shopping campaign

Then, tick the option that allows you to sync the two platforms to keep everything updated.

Universal Event Tracking

Universal Event Tracking (UET) is a Microsoft tool that helps track the sales and conversions that stem directly from your Bing shopping campaigns. 

Events are consumer actions like clicks throughs, add to carts, and purchases. You can track which events matter most to you and follow the consumer’s path from start to finish.

This tracking will help you understand how much revenue you can attribute to your Bing ads. The process includes applying a UET event tag and short web coding to record the conversions as they come.

Use Microsoft’s how-to guide for implementing UET for your Bing shopping campaigns.

Microsoft Ad Extensions

To help businesses of every kind (including you ecommerce folks), Microsoft has developed a series of ad extensions for Bing shopping campaigns.

What are my favorite extensions for ecommerce businesses?

Well, since you asked:

  • Sitelink extensions: Sitelinks are a cool tool that sends ecommerce customers straight to the right page. Word on the street is that you can’t actively control these on Google, so take advantage of this in Bing ads.
  • Image extensions: Add relevant images to your Bing ad using image extensions.
  • Review extensions: Show average reviews for your ecommerce products, right on the ad.
  • Price extensions: List your competitive price to lure in consumers from the SERP.
  • Action extensions: Add a call-to-action to your campaign that’s clear, concise, and action-oriented.

Shopify Ecommerce Store Integration

If you use Shopify to run your ecommerce store, you can integrate it directly with Bing Shopping.

Use the Shopify app to streamline analytics and keep all your data in one easy-to-access place. 

Shopify is especially helpful for ecommerce teams who want collaborative access to Bing shopping campaign info. But regardless of how many people you have on your side, it’s undoubtedly beneficial for Shopify store owners.

Set up Bing Remarketing Audiences

Remarketing is a process that lets you target consumers based on their prior web actions.

Keep in mind, if you import Google shopping feeds over to your Microsoft Merchant Center, you can’t import your remarketing data. That means whether you’re importing or starting campaigns from scratch, you’ll need to set up remarketing audiences manually.

Start with your existing audiences in your Microsoft Advertising platform.

You’ll also want to make sure you’ve set up UET tags and coded them into your website. This tagging makes sense considering you’re basing it off of the customer’s previous actions, so you need to track them.

Once you hit the “Audience” page, click “Create a remarketing list.”

From there, create a tag and configure the settings as you see fit. And whatever you do, don’t forget to save!

Use Local Inventory Ads For Storefronts

Bing’s local feature is pretty cool. It shows your ads for localized product queries, including cities, states, or phrasing such as “near me.” 

So if your ecommerce business also has a local storefront, set up Local Inventory Ads to maximize reach. 

All you have to do is provide your shop’s physical location, upload and submit product info, keep your inventory updated, and enable your Microsoft Shopping Campaigns.

Conclusion

There’s no denying Google‘s prowess, but ecommerce advertisers should consider Bing campaigns as well.

Adding Bing shopping campaigns to your marketing repertoire is an easy way to diversify your paid advertising.

Is your ecommerce business ready for an adventure into the world of Bing shopping?

The post How to Set Up Microsoft Bing Shopping Campaigns for E-Commerce Businesses appeared first on Neil Patel.

Microsoft Great Plains FA

Microsoft Great Plains FA

Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains is marketed for mid-size business in addition to Navision (which has excellent placements in Europe as well as arising markets where it can be quickly local).
Great Plains Fixed Assets Management component is a durable device that can aid you handle your properties successfully. It incorporates flawlessly with various other Great Plains components like General Ledger, Purchase Order Processing, and also Payables Management making sure precision while minimizing repetitive information access.
Great Plains’ user-friendly visual individual interface makes it very easy to accessibility sustaining information on properties, publications, and so on. The most recent variations of Great Plains Fixed Asset likewise comes with an overall of 16 devaluation techniques covering varied markets for compatibility with firm choices.
Functions:
Easy Asset Setup– Manage and also develop and also endless variety of publications of possessions for each and every business, consisting of company, government tax obligation, alternate minimal tax obligation, as well as a lot more.
Personalized Setup– Add up to 15 user-defined areas to track any type of industry-specific details that you require. You can additionally establish layouts and also defaults to satisfy company requirements.
Possession Tracking– Track extensive info regarding possessions utilizing user-defined or common areas, in several amounts or by a possession part like master ID number or property suffix.
Possession Classes– Define property courses to establish defaults for a team of possessions, in addition to established features such as devaluation or property retired life for several properties at once.
Balancing Conventions– Utilize a range of balancing conventions for taking care of properties consisting of averaging by half year, mid quarter, complete month, complete duration, complete year, as well as others.
Devaluation Management – Use any one of 16 devaluation approaches such as straight line, continuing to be life, and also amortization, and also anticipate your devaluation expenditures for monetary job.
Property Review– View and also examine comprehensive details concerning properties on-screen consisting of possession account, individual, insurance coverage, or lease information, or pierce to the coming from deal to take a look at higher information.
Possession Manipulation– Manage possessions with effective devices for including or transforming possessions such as retired life, transferals, as well as making mass modifications to numerous possessions.
Coverage Flexibility– Share info with a variety of common records such as devaluation journals, residential property transfer, stock checklist, and also property retired lives. Produce personalized records making use of SmartList, Report Writer, as well as Crystal Reports.
All the best with modification, application as well as assimilation and also if you have worries or concerns– we are right here to aid! If you desire us to do the work – provide us a phone call 1-630-961-5918 or 1-866-528-0577! help@albaspectrum.com

This is helpful for dropping, retiring, or merely transforming the details for a collection of properties with a solitary click. Great Plains’ instinctive visual customer interface makes it simple to accessibility sustaining information on properties, publications, and so on. The newest variations of Great Plains Fixed Asset additionally comes with an overall of 16 devaluation approaches covering varied sectors for compatibility with business choices. You additionally have the alternative to back devaluation out, recalculate, include extra depreciable quantity, as well as task devaluation for years in advance for any kind of number of possessions in your publication.

The post Microsoft Great Plains FA appeared first on ROI Credit Builders.

Microsoft Great Plains FA

Microsoft Great Plains FA

Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains is marketed for mid-size business in addition to Navision (which has excellent placements in Europe as well as arising markets where it can be quickly local).
Great Plains Fixed Assets Management component is a durable device that can aid you handle your properties successfully. It incorporates flawlessly with various other Great Plains components like General Ledger, Purchase Order Processing, and also Payables Management making sure precision while minimizing repetitive information access.
Great Plains’ user-friendly visual individual interface makes it very easy to accessibility sustaining information on properties, publications, and so on. The most recent variations of Great Plains Fixed Asset likewise comes with an overall of 16 devaluation techniques covering varied markets for compatibility with firm choices.
Functions:
Easy Asset Setup– Manage and also develop and also endless variety of publications of possessions for each and every business, consisting of company, government tax obligation, alternate minimal tax obligation, as well as a lot more.
Personalized Setup– Add up to 15 user-defined areas to track any type of industry-specific details that you require. You can additionally establish layouts and also defaults to satisfy company requirements.
Possession Tracking– Track extensive info regarding possessions utilizing user-defined or common areas, in several amounts or by a possession part like master ID number or property suffix.
Possession Classes– Define property courses to establish defaults for a team of possessions, in addition to established features such as devaluation or property retired life for several properties at once.
Balancing Conventions– Utilize a range of balancing conventions for taking care of properties consisting of averaging by half year, mid quarter, complete month, complete duration, complete year, as well as others.
Devaluation Management – Use any one of 16 devaluation approaches such as straight line, continuing to be life, and also amortization, and also anticipate your devaluation expenditures for monetary job.
Property Review– View and also examine comprehensive details concerning properties on-screen consisting of possession account, individual, insurance coverage, or lease information, or pierce to the coming from deal to take a look at higher information.
Possession Manipulation– Manage possessions with effective devices for including or transforming possessions such as retired life, transferals, as well as making mass modifications to numerous possessions.
Coverage Flexibility– Share info with a variety of common records such as devaluation journals, residential property transfer, stock checklist, and also property retired lives. Produce personalized records making use of SmartList, Report Writer, as well as Crystal Reports.
All the best with modification, application as well as assimilation and also if you have worries or concerns– we are right here to aid! If you desire us to do the work – provide us a phone call 1-630-961-5918 or 1-866-528-0577! help@albaspectrum.com

This is helpful for dropping, retiring, or merely transforming the details for a collection of properties with a solitary click. Great Plains’ instinctive visual customer interface makes it simple to accessibility sustaining information on properties, publications, and so on. The newest variations of Great Plains Fixed Asset additionally comes with an overall of 16 devaluation approaches covering varied sectors for compatibility with business choices. You additionally have the alternative to back devaluation out, recalculate, include extra depreciable quantity, as well as task devaluation for years in advance for any kind of number of possessions in your publication.

The post Microsoft Great Plains FA appeared first on ROI Credit Builders.