Update your budgets and bidding strategy to reflect the ROI goals for your business
When evaluating your Microsoft adCenter budgets and bids it’s important to understand how the auction will change with the introduction of Yahoo! Search traffic and increased advertiser competition. Focus on the overall ROI goals of your business and adjust your monthly budgets and bids to stay on target. Please take action by adhering to the following recommendations so you don’t miss out on reaching potential customers.
Tip 1: Increase your monthly spend to at least one-third of your overall SEM budget
You will need to increase your Microsoft adCenter budget to account for the increased volume from Yahoo! Search traffic. Your Microsoft adCenter ads will run on Bing and Yahoo! Search (including Microsoft and Yahoo! Core Search sites) providing a sizable volume of 5.6 billion monthly searches and a 29% search share – which is nearly one-third of queries in the U.S.1 Aligning your monthly spend to meet the market share is an efficient way to prioritize your budget. We are also improving how your daily budget is spent in Microsoft adCenter to help minimize overspending, which means you can plan your budget more precisely. With these dynamics in mind, your budgets could be depleted faster than expected, which could cause you to miss out on potential clicks. While you are the best judge to determine how much your business can spend, we recommend you adjust your monthly spend to one-third of your overall search engine marketing (SEM) budget to help ensure you don’t miss out on clicks and conversions. For example, if your SEM budget is $1,000 per month, your Microsoft adCenter budget should be at least $333 per month. Learn more about setting your Microsoft adCenter budget.
Tip 2: Adjust your bids for more advertiser competition
As new advertisers begin to compete in the Microsoft adCenter auction, bid prices could be affected by more advertisers bidding on the same keywords. Monitor how your bid prices affect your ad position, increase your bids, and set incremental bids as needed to help meet your ROI goals. It is important for you to bid an amount with which you are comfortable and makes sense for your business. Setting incremental bids increases the chance that your ad will be seen by searchers. Incremental bids let you bid an additional amount beyond your keyword bid to target searchers by location, day of week, time of day, age, or gender. Incremental bids also increase your overall bid, making it more likely that your ad will appear in a better position on search results or content-based web pages.
Tip 3: Set keyword bids by match type
With increased volume, match types become especially important to ROI. Match types in Microsoft adCenter are aligned with the industry standard (Broad Match, Phrase Match and Exact Match). If you transition your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns to Microsoft adCenter, your advanced match keywords will transition to broad match, and your standard match keywords will transition to exact match. You can also specify unique bids for each match type – giving you more control over your bidding strategy by letting you align bids to the performance of each match type. For example, you can bid more for exact match keywords that represent your core products and services to help you reach qualified searchers. Learn more strategies for match type success.
Tip 4: Expand your keyword list
Microsoft adCenter allows you to bid separately for singular and plural variations of your keywords and also for common misspellings. This means there are significantly more keywords that can be entered, optimized, and bid on in Microsoft adCenter. With typically less advertiser competition for keyword variations, you have the chance to realize even greater value by bidding on these terms. Try Microsoft Advertising Intelligence – a keyword research and optimization tool offered as a Microsoft Office Excel 2007 add-in – to develop keyword lists, and gain insight into current bids, as well as historic and forecasted search volume.
Tip 5: Experiment to determine how to adjust bids
When it comes to bidding and budgets, you know what’s best for your business. It may take time and experimentation to determine how to adjust bids to impact an ad’s rank in the search results, based on factors unique to your industry and individual results. Whether you transition Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns into Microsoft adCenter or optimize existing Microsoft adCenter campaigns, you will need to update your budgets and bidding strategies to maximize results. Use these tips as a guide, and prepare to update your budgets and bidding strategy to help you achieve the level of query and click volume you desire.
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