More than 158 million unique searchers access Yahoo search and Bing each month, which means that the unified marketplace has nearly 30 percent of search market share. Unfortunately, many advertisers report that their spend on adCenter is less than 30 percent of their total search advertising budgets. What’s going on?
It’s been proven that the searchers in the adCenter marketplace are likely to spend 26 percent more than the average searcher. However, one problem is that advertisers aren’t always able to access all of the impression volume that is available.
In an effort to help adCenter advertisers access more volume, and to make it easier than ever for advertisers to succeed, a number of feature enhancements have recently launched to give more insight into these lost impression opportunities. Below are some of the best practices for leveraging these features, as well as other expert tips to increase volume.
Identify Missed Impressions
In recent months, increasing exposure to lost advertising opportunities has been a major priority, and this has been achieved with enhancements such as:
- Ad Delivery Status – Now available in adCenter’s user interface, this tool allows advertisers to more quickly identify issues (like depleted budgets, editorial issues, etc) at the campaign, ad group and keyword levels.
- Impression Share Reporting – New reporting options are now available in the Campaign, Account and Ad Group Performance reports to effectively prioritize optimization efforts to counteract impression share lost to bid, budget, rank and relevance.
- Enhancements to Negative Keywords – One of the most common reasons for lost impressions used to be conflicts between keywords and negative keywords, which would block an ad from being served. Thanks to recent changes to the user interface, reporting and Desktop, advertisers have multiple touch points to identify, and remove, these conflicts. These new insights support earlier efforts to make negative keywords more efficient, including the introduction of exact match negative keywords, as well as changes to the way the negative keyword hierarchy works.
Maximize Impression Share
All of this new insight into lost volume is only a benefit if advertisers know what to do next. Here are some best practices for regaining those lost opportunities:
- Budget: If you learn that your ads are being throttled due to low daily or monthly campaign budgets, you can leverage the Opportunities tab for budget recommendations.
- Ad Position: For ads that are serving on the mainline (or even on the first search engine results page), an increase in bids could help increase your impression and click traffic. For existing keywords, bid suggestions are available in the Desktop, as well as the Opportunities tab in the user interface. If you need more guidance for bidding, check out this article about the ideal bidding techniques.
- Landing Page and Keyword Relevance: Once you identify that you’re losing traffic due to relevance, you can pinpoint less relevant ads and landing pages by including Quality Score in your performance reports. Historical and Aggregate Quality Score data has recently been added to these reports, and can help to gauge the affects of optimizations, as well as to maintain high quality scores across your campaigns.
- Maximize Traffic with Broad Match: Increasing the number of search queries that your ads are being matched to is the easiest way to maximize your volume on adCenter; the easiest way to accomplish this is to opt your keywords into Broad Match. You can learn about the recent changes to Broad Match here.
- Add More Keywords: Keyword expansion is the tried and true method to increasing volume. In addition to using the search query report as a source for new keywords, Microsoft Advertising’s Ad Intelligence tool can also help you expand your campaigns. You can learn more about the recent enhancements to this Excel add-in here.