Microsoft adCenter Upgrades for 2011 Holiday Season

Microsoft adCenter has upgraded their reporting tools, features, and user interface. Microsoft believes these new changes will help advertisers to understand their accounts better for the upcoming holiday season.

Most of the changes are focused around the user interface for the client. AdCenter has been changing the Navigation and Discovery.

With the new UI you can manage keywords across your entire campaign and different ad groups all at the same time. While you’re doing this you now have the option to filter the account in almost any way possible. This makes it easier for users to filter out what they don’t want and access only the wanted data for deeper analysis.

Campaign setup has been simplified significantly. The new UI allows a much more user friendly Campaign setup. The whole Campaign setup is all on one page with the ability to preview you ads right on that page. This helps new advertisers to be able to set up everything on one page and not forget something from the previous page as it did before.

The new multi-metric trend charts appear on the Home and Campaign tabs to help you to compare up to five different performance metrics in the same place. You can hover over one of the five charts to pull up more details and zero in on the different data. It will also allow a cut and paste feature and allow your to copy data and move it within the Desktop.

There are a ton of improvements in the keywords grid. Now you can review keyword impression and positional bid estimates using the estimation feature. This will allow you to see estimates on every keyword based on your ad position. This is very nice for users to be able to plan out spend and for PPC managers to be able to plan out what keywords to go after and how much they will be spending. The new bulk big suggestions also offers more than 1,000 keywords and lets you easily apply all changes.

In addition, they have upgraded the opportunities tab. Now the opportunities tab will offer bid suggestions for exact and broad match keywords. This will help you easily identify new and underperforming keywords in your account.

Here are some additional updates to adCenter:

• An improved historical and aggregated Quality Score data in reporting so you can view your aggregated quality score by time frame, including hour, day, week, month or a summary. This helps provide better insights into opportunities for improvement
• An upgrade to Change History reports so you can view changes made to targeting, and gain better insights into campaign performance related to targeting changes
• New Keyword ID field designed to make it easier for API users to update their bids
• An upgraded Homepage Dashboard with a new feature to track campaign performance more easily
• A new Share of Voice feature that quantifies missed impressions in Account, Campaign, and Ad Group performance reports and helps prioritize optimizations more effectively
• A new improved Opportunities Tab that includes bid suggestions for exact/broad match and In-line editing. With this new feature you can easily address underperforming bids to target more volume

With all the new features and upgrades Microsoft hopes to allow the user greater flexibility and control over our Campaigns.

One of the only things that I wish the new adCenter Desktop application would have is the ability to view and change Mobile Campaign data. I would also like to block unwanted ads much like Google announced last week. I’ve been a good boy, hopefully I’ll get this in time for the holidays!