For all the advertising that Yahoo! and Microsoft are doing to share how many potential unique searchers you can reach on their combined platforms, this is arbitrary if you are not making a return on your ad spend. Before you rush to increase your budget, ensure your account is optimized and track performance diligently.

Here are 7 tips to make sure you are covering PPC optimization basics:

1. Increase Budget Incrementally: Do not go crazy and set initial adCenter budgets too high. Microsoft recommends an increase that allows you to ‘cover the full volume’ of traffic from Yahoo! and Bing to ensure ‘maximum coverage’. BUT, the fact of the matter is that it is much easier to burn through more budget on the combined platform. Given you cannot control where you allocate your budget (Yahoo! or Bing), the algorithm will no doubt push your money to be spent, with or without a return. Track performance before making arbitrary budget increases.

2. Maximize Keyword Coverage: If you have transitioned your campaigns from Yahoo! you may find gaps in keyword coverage. By having parity with your Google campaigns you should be able to plug the gap in coverage.

Similar to Google, adCenter treats singular/plural and misspelling variations as unique keywords. Also, adCenter has the similar broad, phrase, exact match types that Google recognizes, so opt into the match types that your Yahoo! campaign could not utilize.

3. Ensure Proper Ad Copy Export: Remember that in Excel, ad creative upload for adCenter is just a single field, not two lines. A simple merge in Excel will give you the correct adCenter format. Also, Google and Yahoo! ad descriptions can be up to 71 characters, (with an implied space between Google creative lines) while Bing only allows 70 characters. Check that you meet all character limits before upload.

4. Optimize Ads & Refine Ad Copy: In adCenter, ads are rotated in response to search queries – this spreads impressions and clicks between all ads in an ad group. Pause or delete lower-performing ads and delete, old redundant ads to ensure the best ads are displayed more frequently.

5. Leverage Negative Keywords: adCenter has finally lifted its ridiculous negative keyword limit, so now you can add thousands at the campaign and ad group levels. However, you need to delete negatives at the keyword level as the list limit has not been expanded there yet. If you do not do this, your keyword-level negatives will override your newly expanded lists at the higher levels.

A word of caution, adCenter negative keyword settings are not as advanced as Google’s so when copying negatives from Google, ensure that your ‘negative match type based’ keywords are not blocking your ads from serving for relevant search phrases. i.e: Google ‘negative exact’ type keywords will be recognised as normal negatives in adCenter.

6. Correct Keyword-Level Tracking: Bing ad group creative destination URLs supersede keyword level destination URLs. Creative destination URLs should be set to {param 1} to ensure that your keyword level tracking is accurate.

7. Network Distribution Settings: When you transition your accounts from Yahoo! your search ad groups will be set to distribute at the default setting, so you need to make the appropriate selection in adCenter. The three distribution options for search ad groups are:

- All Bing and Yahoo! search networks and syndicated search partners (default)
- Only Bing and Yahoo! Search syndicated partners
- Only Bing and Yahoo! sites in the U.S. and Canada

At this stage it looks like these settings need to be changed manually, as neither the adCenter interface, nor the adCenter Desktop Tool allow you to quickly edit this. If you have an account rep, the best bet is to contact them to assist with this, as they have a more advanced version of the Desktop Tool available to them.


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