Microsoft Advertising adCenter will be undergoing scheduled maintenance from 11:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. PDT on Saturday, August 20th. Heres what you need to know During this time, your ads will continue to serve, but you will be unable to access campaigns or make updates via the UI, Desktop or API during the maintenance window. If youre working on offline updates via the Desktop, you may upload them once the maintenance is complete.

When you hear a mention of pay-per-click, or PPC, advertising, whats the first thing that jumps to mind? Like most online marketers, you most likely think about the ads running along the tops and right rails of search results I know I do. While ads appearing on search engines are probably the most commonly referred to PPC ads, theres another PPC option that you might want to consider: Content Ads .

Next week, savvy search marketers from all over will descend upon the city by the bay for SES San Francisco will you be one of them? If so and you have yet to grab your tickets , use promo code 20BING to get 20% off the price of admission. Once youve arrived at the conference, swing by the Microsoft Advertising booth )#701( for a free, ten minute account optimization session with one of our search marketing experts. In addition to being available to answer your questions,

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. Tina Every now and then two of my favorite subjects appear in the same article, or blog post,

You told us that adCenters budgeting system was too complex, inconsistent with other ad platforms, and difficult to manage. We were listening, and were pleased to have arrived at a major development milestone aimed at addressing this feedback.

We had a chance to catch up with Caroline Keane who is an ad support manager at Microsoft in Dublin. Apart from investigating tool problems she helps with the planning and prioritization of future adCenter features and fixtures. Behind every company are many teams and individuals with their own specialisms and insights so we asked Caroline what she does and what advice she could give from her teams experience to help adCenter blog readers. What is it that you do at Microsoft?

In March, Editorial guidelines pertaining to intellectual property )IP( went through a substantial change in North America. Advertisers are now allowed to bid on other advertisers trademarked terms as long as they are categorically relevant. While.

In my hometown, there was a small independent movie theater that, like all small independent movie theaters, went out of business. The big movie houses were just too much competition. It sat empty for a number of years, but then an entrepreneur with a unique vision came along and bought it up. He had dreams of making it an art house theater that ran art films and foreign films.

Today, we will be making updates to our broad match and phrase match behavior. The goal of this enhancement is to deliver higher-performing and more relevant impressions and clicks to advertisers invested in those match types. We suggest that you monitor.

So Shahs Cars has campaigns, ad groups and keywords. Its ad copy reads like more digestible Shakespeare and it is live on the web. Job done, right? Wrong, Shahs Cars PPC journey has only just begun. Using Microsofts Advertising tools you can now follow your campaigns, find out how your ads are performing and improve them with amazing results. First,

Whether your new to online advertising or a grizzled veteran, the more information you have at your disposal, the more successful youll be. While you may be aware of your options for learning more about adCenter and pay-per-click advertising both here on the Community site as well as via the Help links within the adCenter user interface, you may not be aware of some of the other resources located on our sister site, Microsoft Advertising for Small Businesses .

If youve been following along here on the adCenter Blog and in our forums, by now you may have noticed that were big fans of collecting your feedback and feature requests ; this crucial information gives us a pulse on on what you like, what you dont and what improvements youd like to see, which then helps to inform future upgrades. In the July 2011 adCenter Upgrade,

Last week Akhila filled you in on how to apply match types and bids to your SMB accounts. The Shahs Cars account is now ready to go live, but theres just one more adCenter feature to explore: Negative Keywords . Trust me, its all positive when it comes to negatives. Negative keywords are an optional aid to help prevent your adverts from being displayed when a search query contains your keywords but the search query as a whole is irrelevant to your landing page content.

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.

You told us adCenters budgeting options were too complicated and difficult to manage. The manner in which your search marketing dollars were going to be dispersed was not always clear nor consistent. This month, we will make another adjustment.

Our imaginary account for Shahs Cars is now complete with campaigns, ad groups and keywords. Next, we need to write some awesome ads. Writing effective ads that target the right customers can help increase your click-through-rate )CTR( and increase the campaigns return on investment )ROI(. Top 8 Tips for Writing Effective Ad Copy 1. Know your limits The limit for ad titles is 25 characters. For descriptions its 70 characters.

On Saturday, July 23, 2011, the adCenter web user interface, Desktop )Beta( and API will be unavailable from approximately 11:00 AM PDT to 7:00 PM PDT for routine system maintenance. Users in all markets will be unable to access adCenter during this time.

While anyone can access the free adCenter Training offered through the Microsoft Advertising Accredited Professional Program , only those who are able to successfully pass the Accredited Professional exam earn the distinction and member benefits that come with their passing grade. When youre ready to take that crucial step of marketing yourself/your company to potential clients as a PPC expert, youre ready to become a Microsoft Advertising Accredited Professional.

So far, youve done everything right: youve read up on our blog posts about quality standards and relevance policy . You have a great site and fantastic brands to promote. You have carefully chosen relevant keywords , and written ads that.

One of the major misconceptions of digital marketing is that a client must have big purse strings to afford to do anything really impactful in the display advertising space. Also synonymous for display, is brand advertisingi.e.,.