Thursday, March 26th, 2009
Microsoft adCenter is Microsoft's answer to Google's AdWords. It's the main search engine business for Microsoft.
Imagine you are a simple businessman, who has his own website and you want to bring more traffic on your site. As you are familiar with Microsoft software for decades now, naturally you'll want to check out their online advertising system.
Here are some basic guidelines to make the experience less painful:
First pitfall - Don't even consider using Safari or any other browser except IE and Mozilla, adCenter website does not support other browsers. Their help center states that also Mac and Virtual machines are not supported.
microsoft adCenter Safari
Before he found out that all Mac browsers are banned, Alec, our creative director, spent several hours trying to get Microsoft adCenter to work with all of the browsers under Mac OS, including spoofing the user-agent. Futile, he assures me. You can't even view the System requirements page!
Microsoft adCenter system requirements for Mac users: unviewable!
The page loads forever!
What is Microsoft thinking here? I know they are PC centric, but making potential advertisers lives miserable by not allowing them access via their preferred platform? No wonder Microsoft's Live.com is in last place among the big three search engines.
After installing Mozilla or using IE you log in into setup pages. Using Medium security settings (one of the defaults) on IE will cause Second pitfall - Their site will popup a security warning on your IE, telling you that some parts of the web-page are not secure. Well if you are cautious person you'll probably shut down your browser and never use their service again. If not you have two choices, both bad:
adCenter on Internet Explorer 6
- Lower your security settings
- Click Yes each time you access a page, which will be more than a little annoying.
If you are not very technical, you'll probably need help with setting up ads in adCenter. If you try to do it on your own you'll probably end up spending many hours and you'll call for help in the end.
As a Mac user if you want to use Microsoft adCenter, you will need a copy of VirtualBox (our preferred virtual machine software at Foliovision, due to the absence of painful licensing routines - we do own Parallels have tested VMware but don't use them) or alternative virtual machine software, as well as a copy of Windows XP or 2000. Be careful with Windows 2000 - you may run into limitations there as well.
Even for professional Google AdWords campaign managers, Microsoft adCenter setup is very unpleasant in comparison to the smooth and user-friendly setup of Google's AdWords.
But once you do get onto adCenter and set up some ads, your chances of a successful campaign (low-volume of course, as there just isn't much traffic there) go way up.
Why?
First, it's so annoying to run a Microsoft adCenter campaign that most people can't be bothered for the volume of traffic involved. The time investment is just so much more efficient in Google AdWords.
Second, the sort of people so clued out as to use Microsoft Search / Live.com for their searches are likely to be either highly inexperienced internet users or totally straight dweebs who believe in Microsoft.
In either case, they are a public who are more likely to part with their money more quickly, as they lack the savvy or will to shop around more aggressively. I.e. good potential clients.
Our live testing on client campaigns supports this view. Microsoft Live campaigns are delivering a sale for 1/3 the cost of the same sale on Google AdWords.
So even Mac Users have grounds to swallow their distaste and start their virtual machines.
By Peter
WordPress |
Friday, January 4th, 2008
google mail ads
One of my clients recently moved to Google Apps as their full time email solution.
I had my reservations at the time, but more on privacy grounds than technology ones. It turns out there are technology issues as well. My client was very excited about improved spam filtering from Postini. After the move he told me right away that he was getting a lot less spam.
This same client runs an insurance business with online application forms. Those forms go to special unfiltered email boxes. Of course those addresses aren't released publicly.
So they get all their forms and don't have to worry about miscreant insurance filters (most of my other clients are in real estate and we have filtering issues in real estate and mortgages as well).
Over the holidays, we couldn't figure out why Adwords was sometimes claiming more completed applications than the client was receiving. My tests were working. Finally we compared lists.
My client wasn't getting all the completed applications that were going into the database.
It turns out that Google Apps/Mail were deleting quotations (even though they were coming from his own domain).
What's the solution?
There are several, including setting up filters which move the wanted mail into a special saved box or the archive (why would you want your fresh mail there), but the best one is to add the address which you want whitelisted to your contact book.
- Click on and open an email from the sender that you want to whitelist.
- Click on the little down-pointing-triangle-arrow next to “reply”
- Add sender to contacts list.
Here is what the Add to Contacts function looks like when highlighted:
Gmail white list - Add to Contacts:
Nasty looking Ads - Not in My Email Thank You
There are other solutions for white listing a whole domain. In this case, you need to create a special folder for white listed mail and set up a mail filter for the domain in question sending it to one of the folders. How this works is that the incoming mail is filtered before going through Postini's spam filters. In general, this is commendable engineering as anything white listed will really get to its mail box and runs no risk of being lost in a spam filter.
Here are the eight steps:
- Click on "Settings" at the top right.
- Click the "Filter" tab in the yellow headings section.
- Click the link "Create a new filter".
- In the Choose search criteria section in the "From" field type in the email address or if it's a trusted website then you may opt to simply type the main name of the domain (eg. "howtomarketyourstuff.com" without the quotes).
- Click the "next step" button.
- Select the "Star it" radio box.
- Click the "Create Filter" button.
- The emails will end up in your Starred folder.
Convenient enought but it wouldn't work for my client or many other Gmail users.
Why not? Well, this client actually handles his Google App mail through Outlook when he is not on vacation so extra folders in Gmail looks like a problem waiting to happen. Perhaps someone else who runs Outlook and Gmail can let me know if the extra folder with its mail will turn up in Outlook or not...
Frankly, there were a number of deals which my client missed while the quotations were in Google Mail's Spam Folder. It took us longer to track down the hole than normal as it was not consistent and my client was away on holidays with limited computer access).
I have to say free apps can be awfully expensive.
By Alec
IT |
Saturday, May 19th, 2007
It's official - Google will be kicking the AdSense spammers off the network.
What AdSense spam is are those sites which you arrive on via either organic search or PPC results (usually the former) and you find nothing but RSS feeds or chopped up articles on a very basic template. The sites rarely have any contact information. To be blunt, they are of no value at all except to their owner who brings in traffic at one price and sells it off at another price.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
