Redmond, Washington — In a fresh attempt to lure advertisers and garner more ad revenue, Microsoft’s has just released a pretty hefty July update to its adCenter with some amazing new features, including the ability to measure tablet traffic via Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, in addition to focusing upon improved tablet support; raising ad-group limits and restricted-site limits; and a simplified/easier-on-the-eyes billing screen.
Of late, the company in recent months has been working tirelessly to match Google AdWords’ features and make it easier for advertisers to simply import their existing AdWords campaigns into adCenter.
Apart from existing support for smartphones, Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, the desktop Excel add-on utilized for research, will now allow users to find tablet-specific information for Traffic, Keyword Performance, Search-User Location, Age Group & Gender. In addition, you can now also find out how much traffic is coming from tablet devices for particular keywords. Similarly, you can analyze keyword performance when a search is performed for those keywords on a tablet. (See graphic.)
With many cool features, the company has put great efforts to make it easier to import campaigns from AdWords, Microsoft has boosted the number of ads per ad group from 20 to 50. Unfortunately, if you attempt to import more than 50 ads, you will receive an error message. Any ads over and above that limit will not be added to your ad group, so should be placed in a new ad group of their own.
In fact, this latest modification is for search and contextual ads only, not mobile or Rich Ads in Search. This capability will be made available in the Desktop software in August. Also, as a best practice, adCenter search experts recommend keeping no more than 10 active ads in an existing ad group.
More so, if you have opted into Yahoo! Search and Bing syndicated search partner traffic, you can now limit up to 2,000 sites on their exclusion list, either at the campaign or ad group levels. Previously, only 500 sites were allowed. Again, this change will also roll out this month in adCenter, but would not appear in the Desktop interface until next month.
Lastly, a major boost to the survival line… Users of adCenter will also soon see a new Billing screen, with a new “Payment Methods” tab and a new view of the Account Summary.
However, the new view functionality boast more options as it now displays coupon balance; total account balance; account status; and most recent invoice, and allows for inline edit; inline coupon redemption; and inline edit of account details and company information (thus, no need for another tab to complete these updates).