Microsoft adCenter has opened up a new thread on the adCenter Blog that allows its faithful users the ability to post suggestions for future product upgrades. The full story can be viewed here. There are a few posts that are actually going into consideration for the next update but hopefully someone will ask for longer idle session times and browser back button integration.
Technorati Tags: MSN, SEM, Search Engines
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The scheduled update which will allow negative keywords to be added at campaign levels has been postponed, according to the latest adcenter Blog. You can read their full apology here. Maybe this is why they are third in the Tier 1 search engine ranks. Oh well I just hope they extend the length of an inactive session past 10 seconds or this upgrade means nothing to me.
Some search engine marketers might be wondering if it really is advantageous to revive an old Adwords campaign. This is especially common when dealing with a new client who has had a previous Adwords campaign. The answer is relative to the older campaign’s performance. As Seroundtable.com puts it
As far as old campaigns go, if the account has a really bad history and not-so-good quality scores, it’s better to close that account and start from scratch rather than to revive an old account and have Google use that history against you. After all, as member Jeremy Brookins says, “if you move your keywords, Google continues to consider that keyword’s previous history. HOWEVER, it also will weight in an expected performance of the new
adgroup/ad/landing page, which can be a good or bad thing depending on your previous performance.”
Plus, if you are using an older campaign it will take less time to setup which can be a plus for the lazier… I mean busier SEM.
Ask.com has just relaunched their search engine interface Ask3D and I have say that Ask.com really has hit the mark with this innovative update. Users can get refined search query suggestions, search results and categorized results on the same page which really provides a more through and inviting feel compared to the older SERP models. In addition to this they offer a new “binocular” feature that allows users to view a page without clicking on the link. Ask.com provides a full description of their new update here.
After spending some time using some of the new features I have to say that I am really impressed with what I’ve seen so far. I was a bit skeptical about the cleanliness and ease of use for the new features particularly the clutter that I expected to see with all this information packed into one SERP. However, I am really surprised at how intuitive and user friendly the new features feel. The SERP is organized in a very clear cut manner and with multichannel search results displayed it makes searching so much easier and quicker. The only pivotal difference that I saw, in terms of sponsored and organic results, is that there seems to be less emphasis on the sponsored results. Although it seems like this would have a negative effect the sponsored results have less of a paid advertising “feel” to them and may attract users who are wary marketers aggressively advertising irrelevant sites.
It really looks like Ask.com has got a winner here but let’s just wait until Google gets wind of the idea and makes it better.
Problogger.net, by Darren Rowse, has been one of my inspirations ever since I ran into his blog a while back. Check out his SEM section for a valuable collection of articles relating specifically to blogs (but could be applied to anywhere else).
