On Saturday, October 15, 2011, adCenter will be unavailable from approximately 10:00 AM PDT to 10:00 PM PDT for routine system maintenance. Though you will be unable to access adCenter during this time, please note that campaigns will continue to run.

The ideal search experience is for a user to enter a keyword, get see ads related to that keyword that create expectations, and get a landing page that fulfills the expectations and promise of the ad. The user is provided with the information or product.

The holidays are upon us. it doesnt seem quite possible, but its true. In less than a month, Americans will start spending an estimated $465 billion on holiday gifts for their family and friends. 1 With an anticipated growth of 2.8% over last years holiday spending, its looking favorable that e-commerce spending will surpass the $32 billion 2 it brought in last year drawing more than 67% of consumers online to make a holiday purchase .

If you havent been to HPs 367 Addison Avenue Blog , its a great resource for small-to-medium business owners with helpful tips, tricks and advice to help bring your business to the next level. Melissa Zieger, the editor at 367 Addison, has been kind enough to share some of her content with us; it will be cross-posted here from time to time.

Matthew Stibbe is CEO and writer-in-chief at Articulate Marketing , where he helps high-clients such as Microsoft, HP, Symantec and NetJets communicate clearly with their customers. He is also the founder of TurbineHQ.com , the easy the easy way to take care of office paperwork online, including an employee database, expenses, holiday and sickness management and other admin chores. He writes about writing, business and technology on his blog, Bad Language,

On Saturday, October 8, 2011, adCenter will be unavailable from approximately 11:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. Pacific Time for routine system maintenance. Though you will be unable to access adCenter during this time, please note that campaigns will continue.

Sign up now for this free Tech4StartUp Brtiain event in London aimed at small and newly formed businesses. Come along and get a great overview of the latest technologies and how you can master IT basics and gain a competitive advantage in your business. Microsoft is sponsoring the nationwide StartUp Britain initiative, aimed at inspiring, motivating and encouraging and start-ups and small businesses to help grow the economy and this seminar forms part of our efforts to help 5,

If you read our Bing Blog, read the Telegraph, Stuff Magazine or if you have recently searched for tickets for a gig or an event on Bing you are aware of a very cool new feature that just launched in the UK called Bing Events. It is the first time a major search engine has provided a fully comprehensive events listing with all the details needed to ensure a fun night out. What is it and what could it mean to you? )Take a peek at Bing Blog , Telegraph ,

The difference between managing your campaigns via adCenter on the web versus using the adCenter Desktop is akin to the difference between doing long division by hand versus using a calculator. Sure, both get the job done, but one of them is far faster and a more efficient use of your time. Speaking of efficiency, thats what this months adCenter Desktop upgrade is all about: saving you time.

The difference between managing your campaigns via adCenter on the web versus using the adCenter Desktop is akin to the difference between doing long division by hand versus using a calculator. Sure, both get the job done, but one of them is far faster and a more efficient use of your time. Speaking of efficiency, thats what this months adCenter Desktop upgrade is all about: saving you time.

Greetings adCenter Community! As a part of our teams ongoing commitment to understand and respond to customer needs, were expanding our normal internal evaluation process to our customers and would like to invite you to take part as a beta user of our adCenter mobile app. The mobile application, like all other beta projects, is a proof-of concept level application intended to gauge market potential. Its our intention to create a simple,

Here at Microsoft, we want to ensure that ads serving on Bing and Yahoo! are not only relevant, but high quality as well. For this reason, we have Editorial Guidelines to ensure that users are getting both relevant and high quality experiences. The Editorial.

Last night when my train was gliding through the beautiful Yorkshire countryside on a 4,5 hour journey back to my hometown, I summarized a very impressive and inspiring morning session for you from the MADEfestival in Sheffield. Ministers of Parliament and famous and inspiring entrepreneurs fired up an audience of small and medium business people, students and business moguls in the making.

When I lived in Europe, I loved watching the Tour de France at least until the doping scandals hit. I was always fascinated by how the sprinters lined up to be in the best position of winning when the entire peloton was only a mile away from the finish line. Finally 300 yards away, they would break out and race at speeds of 60 miles an hour or more and the slightest strategic advantage would decide who wins the stage. As an advertiser,

Last week, I presented at SMX East in NYC on the adCenter Quality Score. For those of you who couldnt make it to the conference this year, heres a quick summary of my session. Enjoy! In March, adCenter unleashed their Quality Score metrics. Since then, Ive been analyzing how the Quality Score reviews and assigns value to each individual keyword and match type. By understanding how the adCenter Quality Score works, you can utilize it to optimize your PPC campaigns.

Whenever I perform a competitive SEM analysis, its amazing to see how many companies are struggling with, or have completely ignored, landing page strategy. Those companies )including some big brands( often drop prospective customers off on their homepage and expect them to find their way )and of course, convert(. Not only can this approach lead to a big drain on ROI , its completely unnecessary. To me,

A lot of people in the industry have said that mobile search advertising will one day be larger than the PC. While Im sure that day is not too far in the future, during todays Mobile Search Ads panel discussion, I focused on what consumers and advertisers are doing today that is different from the PC, and more importantly, whats working for them. Heres a quick summary for those of you unable to attend: Mobile search is not PC search.

On the last day here at SMX, Rathna Sharad , Group Product Planner for adCenter and Allan Chuate , Regional Manager of Search Strategy for Yahoo! were on the panel of speakers for Ask the Paid Search Reps. Allan Chuate shares that the performance Yahoo! and Bing has seen thus far includes 161 million unique searches, 31.6% search share and 5.9 billion monthly searches.

We recently published a post giving you a glimpse at what's in store in this month's adCenter upgrade - we're happy to announce that these updates are now live. If you missed that original post , here are the details on what's included in the September.

Today I presented at SMX East in NYC on the Best Practices With adCenter For Bing & Yahoo session. My fellow panelists spoke about such topics as... Key differences between Adwords & adCenter Quality score breakdown Recent expansion of broad match & its effect on performance Optimization best practices I thought Id take another route. I decided to share what, in my opinion,