Yes that’s right it’s already the 2nd anniversary of the Microsoft adCenter launch in the UK. The mighty Microsoft gave life to the adCenter search Ads 2 years ago today.

One thing you can say about Microsoft is they always support any product launch fully, dedicated teams located in London, Dublin and Liverpool focus on delivering high customer service levels. Such Microsoft personalities as Mel Carson keep adCenter in the limelight, their dedication to the product seen through conference attendance and client roadshows.

According the the adCenter Community blog
the upgrade will take place around the 23rd ..

1) A centralized, customizable dashboard where you can see key campaign performance indicators at a glance.

2) New visitor Path reports, plus Top Entry and Exit Pages reports, to help you gain insights about visitor behaviour.

3) Age and gender clusters that help you understand the demographic breakdown of your audience.

4) A holistic view of campaign performance across all search engines to help manage your return on investment (ROI) on all your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

will get some screen shots once it updates ..

Daven

It always surprises me when people scribble down notes in little notepads ( ALA Matt Cutts ), then they actually action on the things you say, Google over the year have been really good at this take GoogleGuy.. lol I have not said that in years, like GoogleDance and Update “Big Daddy”, “Florida” and “thatsgonnahurt”

Take this post in seroundtable

And proof that Google does listen to SEO’s suggestions:

At SES London, DaveN had a suggestion. He said: why don’t you give all pages an equal chance of seeing backlinks? That’s good for users, who will have a greater chance of seeing backlinks for a given page, and it’s especially good for smaller websites–they’d have a chance to see backlinks. It seemed like a good idea, so we implemented it. In fact, in order to give each page a better chance of seeing backlinks (instead of just the top M% of pages), we doubled the amount of backlinks that Google exports to the outside world. So users now have access to twice as much link: data as before; it’s just not all the top PageRank pages.

Anyway, we never really had a Conference face for Microsoft ( I have more MSFT contacts than Googlers !! now ) and they do listen !!!

Take Mel Carson, we have been asking for stuff to launch in the UK quicker or even first ;), after chatting with some of the US Reps, I know why ;).. now that excuse is fixed or getting fixed ;)

Last year we asked for a desktop tool like adwords desktop.. and whoa did adCenter provide and provide well, on Friday we saw it in action and it kicked arse !!, I have asked for screen shots but they are been all coy with me :)

We have been asking for more LIVE.com traffic ( ok tough fix ) but with quality comes traffic, with traffic comes clicks, then when I look at the recent Adword Money land grab the people I chatted to (The Big Agency Boys), well they weren’t happy with the quality… and I so want to say more on how MSFT is fixing this !! …

Think of a Search Engine that does NOT need Ad revenue until it’s happy with the Quality… Things like poor quality ads like “SEARCH on SEARCH” in my eyes is the same as dude on dude .. no one wants that first thing in the mornin …

DaveN

when you first look at this you think Dave most be crazy, he is losing money by running PPC , but you start looking a little closer you see a pattern.

the next 2 screen shots show me the times and what happen in a organic sale.

and

You can see this visitor can to the Site at 7:40 for a model number keyword listed in the organic serps, later in the day he came back twice again via organic serps this time the keyword was the url of the site but this time he purchased.

but you see the yellow box that say supported, well that means that the customer originally came from a PPC click, but what I found interesting was:

Customer in the Research Mode

Searches for single keywords example “laptops” or “Mobile PCs” ( in fact I did that today lol ), I was looking at buying an eeePC change my mind and started my research with “ultra light laptop”.

once in the research mode I start collecting a list of Model Numbers or manufacturers.

Customer in Purchase Mode

I start searching for model numbers, Like so many other users I guess because a site I found originally advertising on PPC with Mobile PCs, when I saw them listed organically for the model number I wanted to by, I clicked the listing and purchased.

DaveN

Get over to Mel Carson’s blog and you tell me what this is all about!

DaveN

Adcenters’ Adexcellence went Live yesterday .. so get signed up and get listed on their Membership Directory

adExcellence is designed to give adCenter advertisers the ability to gain valuable adCenter knowledge and demonstrate their expertise.

DaveN

So this is the Lobby of Building 88 at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, And where my Day at Microsoft began

9:45 -10am
Arrive at Microsoft, first Impression it’s just like Yahoo or Google except it’s White in fact I would say very white, I checked in and waited for my first Meeting

10am–11am : Leon Warman

Leon takes me to his Office and the first thing I notice is That EVERYONE has their own office ! we chatted about spam in the index and how LIVE was combating it, what things I had seen, mainly techniques, rather than sites.

11am-12pm Webmaster Tools : Nathan Buggia

Leon was supposed to take me to Nathan’s office but we had just started to over run when Nathan turned up. I ended up in a meeting room where Nathan promptly told me to be honest with the team about how I felt about http://webmaster.live.com which is the beta of the live webmaster portal. It’s Weak I say very weak, Nathan has just loaded slide one .. and to be honest we never got to slide 2, but this was one of my favourite meetings, we chatted about what webmasters needs are, what would make people like me use Live over the competitors, at present live webmaster portal has :

Summary  of your site which basically lets me see that www.davidnaylor.co.uk Domain rank and that it’s not blocked, my top 5 pages and last crawl date

Profile : is basically where I have my XML Sitemap etc

Keywords : at present this is where you can add a keyword and see how your site is performing in live search but I just don’t get it, we chatted about how this could be improved and what I would do…. If they implement my ideas I reckon 50 to 99% of the webmasters would use it.

12pm-1pm Gatineau Team

I think I’m one of the first NON US people to be on this beta, again very open discussion. One thing which has impressed me with all the Microsoft teams I have been with is their openness to what webmasters like me want. Now Gatineau has a way to go yet, but the things I like about it and the ideas that I brought to the table seem to all be doable. We talked about ROI tracking to split testing landing pages, to consoles for webmasters – web marketers – Company owners, what the needs are and why we are so different

1pm-2pm Live.com’s Fall Launch Deep, Sebastian Gard

I could have spent all day with Sebastian, I don’t think I added much to the conversation, lol the more Sebastian showed me what they had pushed out in the fall the more I heard myself saying wow.. from live traffic maps to digital cameras to Viagra .. yes Viagra I was very very impressed..
I loved the fact that the medical stuff is on Https giving the user the ability to search on sensitive issues without the ability of been tracked.. thumbs up Live.com .

2pm-3pm Business Operations Rotimi Olumide

Rotimi made me laugh, he is another real good guy. We discussed UK market share and how Live could get more from the UK. I so want to share my ideas with everyone on this but at the moment I will leave them at Live.

3:30pm-5:00pm Speaker Series

I did my Powerpoint then a Q+A with the audience, then some 1 on 1 with the spam team .. AND most of the off the shelf products to spam the indexes have footprints !! .. the spam team know they still have a way to go but they seem hungry and motivated which isn’t a good thing for spammers lol

7:15pm-11pm Dinner at Etta’s Seafood

Nathan drove me and him to the restaurant he explained how there are only two routes into Seattle from Redmond and as 30,000 other Microsoft cars slowly moved down the freeway, we chatted about about Microsoft, life and living in the Seattle area.

Nathan then showed me the Seattle GUM Wall and decide to see if he could get me drunk and lick it … Eck..

DaveN

Ok it’s does not actually need your help, what they want is more what cool features you would like to see .. so get your backsides over too http://forums.microsoft.com

how often do you get to tell microsoft something and they listen ,, JOKE.. MS customer service rocks. it would rock more if I had my Xbox360 back grrrrr.

DaveN

Well not in my office anyway, so Google say Paid Links to influence search are evil and of course they would, they’re a search engine that’s sells links via JS, don’t we can’t really take a leaf out of google book, because the main traffic pages are robots.txt’d out.. oh the dilemma.

so how can you buy links and not get caught, well first off you could test the links..

but for a site / page that doesn’t matter if page move up by another link for the master site or better ask for the link to be change to master site, again if site moves down pass that link to a competitor.. yer i know it’s dirty and underhand but I still have site pinned down because a competitor buy me links.. cheers, but remember what goes around comes around..

but I guess the really answer is when buying link make dam sure Google has to ask it’s self what was the intent and are we 60% sure it was purchased for improving search rankings.

here is something that happened just recently, a Guy rang me up and said his site had lost all traffic from Google, and he hadn’t used any SEO’s and did his own PPC, in fact his site had no spam on it and was pretty under optimised.

Before I jumped in I asked the guy how he markets his website, this took me by surprise the Guy used Hitwise and monitored his competitors, and basically used PPC to clone those sites keywords, One day he found that one of his competitors was getting quite a bit of upstream traffic from a Site, so he went there and found to his surprise that the competitor didn’t advertise on the site, but he did have a text link, so he emailed the site and bought his link right next to the competitor, and so it went on and on every time he saw upstream data he went and purchased the same has his competitors.

Until a few days ago when he rang me.. at first I joked and said Google had banned him because they wanted all his advertising spend.. guess what that’s what he thought too .. I told him that wasn’t the case and he had been hit for link buying and he should stop and ask Googles forgiveness.

At the moment he is testing YPN and ADcenter and looking at stopping using Google, I think the guy has balls he actually wants to see if he can survive without Google. Me I’m going to help the Dude for free just so I get the data ..

what you reckon fail or succeed, btw he had his best day ever today thankyou stumble upon :)

Ian. Just posted on His Blog (www.liesdamnedlies.com) more about Gatineau and how they get the data on age and gender, Btw Ian was supposed to be at Adchamps Europe but Justin Carder stepped up and was pretty awesome I would have to say.

Anyway from Ian’s Blog.

the answer is that we do get this information from users’ Live ID (formerly known as Microsoft Passport) profiles, but I would stress that we get this information anonymously, and there is no use of PII (Personally Identifiable Information, such as name or e-mail address) in the product.

Which Is pretty cool IMO, As an Advertiser I want to get more bang for my Dollar, not just say here is my money go spend it.

and If you outsource your web advertisings to an agency, ask them if your ads are getting age and gender targeted, In fact ask if they have even set-up the account in Live and Yahoo, you will be surprised how many agencies just don’t give a fuck about you !!!

DaveN