by Natalia Klishina

Due to all the interest in my earlier post about transferring campaigns from Google AdWords into Microsoft AdCenter (Bing), I decided to add on some additional information I've learned since then, and to put it all in video form.

Share of US Online Search

Google - 67.6%
Microsoft - 14.1%
Yahoo! - 13.9%
Ask.com - 3.8%
AOL - 0.7%
Conclusion from this: you can be paying a lot less for Bing, so make sure to change your maximum bids when you transfer campaigns (we use about a quarter of our Google bids, and see a quarter of the CPC).

Similarities & Differences

• Same bidding system: pay $0.01 more than the next-highest bidder, all other factors equal.
• AdCenter is PRE-PAY only. AdWords will send you invoices.
• AdWords lets you rotate or optimize ads. AdCenter will automatically optimize by CTR.
• AdCenter does not currently support image or video ads.

Match Types

Note: AdCenter does NOT have modified broad match, which you will have to compensate for. AdCenter also only has negative PHRASE match (no negative exact match).

AdCenter also has keyword normalization, so it will automatically ignore common conjunctions and prepositions (a, about, an, at, by, for, how, in, is, of, on, or, the, to, what, with). That means that if you have a phrase like "what is," both of those words are going to be thrown out because they are noise words.

Ad Structure

AdWords: Line 1 is a maximum of 35 characters; Line 2 is a maximum of 35 characters.
AdCenter: Ad text is a maximum of 70 characters.
Looks the same, but isn't. AdCenter inserts a line break in the most appropriate place automatically; you choose where the line break is in AdWords.

How to Transfer Your Campaigns

Watch the video.

Important Factors to Keep Track Of

1. Make sure your campaign settings transfer correctly (usually the "devices" is what never transfers right).
2. Keep track of your negatives! (AdCenter sometimes calls this "exclusions.")
• "Account negatives," which are new to AdWords, will not transfer because AdCenter only has campaign negatives and lower, so you will need to transfer these manually.
• Since AdCenter doesn't have exact negatives, make sure you find everything that used to be an exact negative and review whether it will work as a phrase negative. Example: you might have an exact negative like -[phone] in AdWords because it's too nonspecific for you to want to capture people searching for just "phone." Once it transfers as the phrase negative "phone," though, it means anyone searching for a phrase with the word "phone" in it will not see your ad.
• Look through all your negative keywords searching for noise words and get rid of them (or the entire phrases). For example, if you had [what is call tracking] as an exact negative phrase, it becomes "what is call tracking." Both "what" and "is" are ignored as noise words, meaning you essentially have the negative keyword "call tracking" for the keyword "call tracking." Don't let it happen to you!
3. Keep track of your modified broach match keywords. They will transfer with the "+," but AdCenter will not recognize what that means. You'll need to manually replace those with either broach match or phrase match.
4. Scroll through all your ads and make sure they look the same visually. Sometimes you will also have to fix length, because the strange break will put you over the length limit.

Also...

DON'T use a mac!

DO download AdCenter Desktop -- the AdCenter equivalent of AdWords Editor.

Good luck!