A few weeks ago we announced a preview of our local PC and mobile ad offerings for Bing and Yahoo! via adCenter. As of this week, radius targeting is live for search ads on PC and for mobile devices in all adCenter markets. Now, Bing and Yahoo! Search.

Todays post comes courtesy of Andrew Davis )aka CPC_Andrew (, Marketing Director at CPC Strategy and a long-time contributor in the Bing Shopping forum take it away, Andrew! - Tina If youre not already familiar with it, Bing Shopping is where online retailers can advertise their products for free. To be included in the program, Bing Shopping requires a shopping feed from all merchants that must be updated at least once a month through Microsofts adCenter.

Bing Shopping Data Feed Optimization Instructions: Optimize your MerchantCategory column . This column is the most important to properly categorize your items. A merchant selling paperweights with the MerchantCategory set to Office Products will be categorized far less effectively than a merchant with the categorization Office Products > Desk Organization > Paperweights.

Back-to-School: The Opportunity Did you know that back-to-school/college brings the second largest opportunity for retailers? Back-to-school season spend is 250% higher than the third-ranking retail holiday, Valentines Day. 1 In 2010 the combined K-12 and college spending reached $55.12 billion. 2 Second only to Christmas, the back-to-school shopping season is a significant part of the U.S.

Sage Lewis is President of SageRock Inc., a digital marketing company founded in 1999 with the goal of helping clients engage customers across an ever expanding interactive marketplace through multiple channels such as search and social media. To learn more about Sage and the company, visit the SageRock, Inc. website . Tina Recently, I've been working with a painting contractor and a private elementary school here in Ohio.

Would you like to create a better experience for your customers? Would you like to get your ads live as fast as possible? Then this post is for you! Following on the U.S parts of this series, we have compiled a list of common reasons for editorial disapprovals weve seen for ads targeting the U.K. and France over the past few months and some best practices to avoid them.

Vertical insights are no stranger to the adCenter Blog, weve been posting industry trends, campaign management tips and keyword lists specific to niche advertisers since 2008. Youve probably seen recent posts like these from our Vertical Specialists, Peter Haubold , Erin ODonnell and Michael Mostert . While all this great information typically makes its way onto the adCenter Blog calendar when anticipated season spikes are looming on the horizon,

The latest Microsoft Advertising adCenter Upgrade includes several improvements that have consistently been requested in the feedback we've received. This upgrade provides easier ways to manage your search and content advertising strategies with adCenter. The changes include improved targeting and enhanced insights. Improved Targeting You can now use Radius Targeting to reach relevant search users in a 5-100 mile radius of any location.

Last week Kate filled you in on How to Set up a New Microsoft Advertising adCenter Account . Now thats done Im guessing you want to find some keywords to go in it, so Im going to talk you through a few different ways of how to do.

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; some of it will be cross-posted here from time to time. Tina Like lots of people, Im intrigued by Groupon , which offers daily deals on food, drink,

In addition to the improvements that were released in April , new updates have just rolled out in the latest adCenter Desktop Beta release. With this upgrade to version 7.8, the following additional functionality will be available: Quality Score . You can now view Quality Score data from adCenter Desktop Beta. You can also create advanced filters andsorts, and bulk update your keywords to optimize your campaigns based on the Quality Score data.

On June 3 rd , we shared a blog post which highlighted common disapprovals for content and style, disallowed content and privacy violations and suggestions on how to avoid disapprovals. Today, we will continue to highlight common disapprovals that Microsoft.

You can spend a lot of time fine-tuning your pay-per-click campaigns, all for the promise of getting potential customers to your website. However, if your site isnt customer-friendly , visitors will desert it faster than you can blink. To convert visitors to paying customers, make your site easy to use, easy to read, and optimized for conversions. Here are five smart ways to accomplish these goals.

Sometimes I believe shoppers and shops live in a parallel universe. The other day I had to find something decidedly summery to wear so I set out to shop after work. Were talking early June, the evening air felt balmy, the streets were buzzing with people socializing, summer was just around the corner. Imagine being outside in these nice, pre-summer conditions looking for summer clothes and finding woolly dark depressing autumn outfits instead in not one but two stores!

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; some of it will be cross-posted here from time to time.

There has never been a better time to start running your search campaigns in adCenter because as you can: · Easily import your Google and Yahoo! campaigns to Bing using the Microsoft adCenter platform · Efficiently promote your business to UK and international markets · Control the costs: you only pay when someone clicks on your ad · Easily set up,

The real estate market seems to be influenced mainly by two factors: economy and seasonality. For real estate advertisers, this means that sunnier perspectives are ahead. Regarding the economy, the National Association of Realtors just released a new survey , stating that Existing-home sales continued to recover in the first quarter with gains recorded in 49 states and the District of Columbia,

Potential customers can land on your site from a variety of avenues: PPC ads, display ads, a referral from a friend, search engine listing, or a local listing. Regardless of how they got there, your visitors will quickly assess whether they are interested in doing business with you. If that first impression is poor, you may have just as quickly lost a potential customer. If you are a small business owner who serves local customersa plumber, dentist, spa, landscaper,

This mornings keynote at SMX Advanced was given by Stefan Weitz, Director of Search at Bing. Stefan kicked off his presentation by pointing out that Honey Badger was the codename for todays release of Bing webmaster tools . He proceeded to draw a parallel between how the famous crazy, nastyass honey badger is fierce and blows away all obstacles to achieve objective, much like the webmasters these new tools were designed for )and, it could be argued,

The Advanced Analytics session at SMX Advanced was chock full of great information for the savvy search marketer. The presentations kicked off with Marin Softwares Co-Founder, Wister Walcott who covered tips ranging from paid search forecasting to number of keywords per ad group and more. In addition to the slide above, some key takeaways from the information he presented for paid search forecasting included the following recommendations: Predict clicks,