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Friday, January 16, 2009


Microsoft and their missed opportunities With paid search.

Microsoft Bid to Beat Google Builds on a History of Misses from the Wall Street Journal has a very detailed look at some of the mistakes Microsoft made early on in the paid search space. The piece goes through the failure of Microsoft’s original Keyword ad platform, named bCentral Keywords, which was discontinued in early 2000. It then discusses the fact that they did not purchase Overture, which Yahoo acquired in 2003. Followed by the failed attempts at buying Yahoo this past year.

we all know Microsoft has made many mistakes in the past with search opportunities. But the most interesting pieces of the article is that Ballmer still wants the deal with Yahoo. It is also very interesting to see that Microsoft’s new search ad platform, adCenter, was code named “Moonshot.” Many advertisers love the feature set within adCenter, so the technology is not the reason adCenter is not competing. As Andrew Goodman notes, it is about market share. Advertisers go where the customers are and the customers are at Google, not Microsoft.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009


Google is testing new AdWords budget option

Google have been offering selected clients a new AdWords budgeting option called "Timeframe". This allows advertisers to choose a monthly budgeting option which allocates budgets across a calendar month according to traffic demands. The monthly budgeting option has only been made available to selected advertisers during a beta testing period.

Most advertisers would be familiar with how daily budgets work, where a set spending limit is applied each day. One of the shortfalls of this approach means that on lower traffic days, you might have some unused budget leftover that could have been used on higher traffic days.

Monthly budgeting eliminates this issue by automatically adjusting your budget each day to match traffic demands. From the AdWords Help Center:

With a monthly budget, Google will adjust your budget automatically each day to meet traffic demand while still respecting your budget for the calendar month. If you've seen this on your AdWords account, let us know what you think!

Create Content To #drawthecrowds

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