The email contains the following advice: -

Your current campaigns may undergo an additional review to ensure that your ads and keywords meet Microsoft adCenter editorial guidelines as of January 15, 2007. If your campaigns do not pass the audit, you may receive valid editorial rejections for your ads or keywords. Help increase your campaign success by ensuring that your ads are shown to the Live Search users who may be most interested in your offer.

To improve the likelihood of an existing ppc advert passig the editorial audit we are advised to follow the revised editorial policies and verify that:

• Keywords are relevant to the landing page and website copy
• Ad copy meets the content guidelines
• Website destination URLs are relevant to the ads and selected target audience

It seems strange that the adverts have not been scruitinised on this basis before.  Previously I have had campaigns suspended some 6 weeks after go live and this looks like another editorial review brought on by evolving policies within MSN.

Other tips offered include advice to remove any keywords that are not relevant.

“Consider modifying your landing page to provide more specific content.
Review your site for any pages where content is more relevant to the product or service offered and consider changing your destination URLs to those pages.
Expand keyword phrases for greater relevance to the product or service offered. 
Include the keyword associated with your target audience in the first line of your ad. ”

“This process helps maintain the quality of experience for Live Search users. Search ads that have a low relevance score generally have a reduced click-through rate compared with relevant ads. A low relevance score can translate into poor performance for your ad.”

Opening the door to pushback and subjective arguments the communication then goes on to say that you can appeal your rejected ads.

“You can appeal keywords and ads that are relevant to the product or the service that is being advertised. Please remove all the irrelevant keywords from your keyword lists, review your landing pages, and group your keywords according to the topic that appears on the landing page to avoid “Landing page” and “Inaccessible website” rejections. ”

Unfortunately the editorial review often involves people remote from a market taking decisions on relevancy with poor results.  Lets hope that this editorial review process removes the really irrelivant ads and leaves the relevant material active.

Tags: editorial audit MSN Adcenter editorial audit communication MSN

This sounds as though it is a benefit and should encourage greater ppc activity in the Yahoo system but I wonder if that is correct. Will minimum bid reductions be a benefit to existing advertisers?

Extracts from the communication advise that: -

• Yahoo Search Marketing is launching today a new minimum bid variable pricing
  structure.
• As of today, bidding prices start from as little as £0.05 although they vary by search term
• They  hope this new minimum bid pricing will help you make the most of your Yahoo! Search Marketing account and allow you to drive even more highly targeted customers to your site.

For existing competitive keywords this will make no difference as a 5p minimum bid will see your advert published on page 8, so the initiative will benefit bids on new terms and those with little competition.

So thanks for the initiative, it may make a small difference at some point but it is not a major initiative that will improve the competitive position against Google Adwords or the rising threat from MSN.   

Tags: Minimum bid Yahoo Search Marketing

One important point is the time it takes for Google to put your campaign live.

Search the Adwords site and you will find good content and guides on how to set up the campaign.

The system has a starter and a standard edition which removes many of the more complex options for the first time starter. If you use trademarked terms the system advises you immediately so that you can apply a correction straight away without incurring a subsequent delay.

Notwithstanding all this there is nothing that explicitly tells you that your campaign will not be live the same day you have opened your account and input the campaign details.

Did you know that there is a manual editorial process and did you realise that this can delay your campaign going live?

The lesson is that once you are thinking of using Adwords you should open your account and set up the campaign to get through this editorial control. Once approved you can pause the campaign to suspend the expenditure whilst you are waiting for the correct timing.

Tags: Google Adwords, adwords editorial, pay per click, adwords

If your feeds are set to full text you could be delivering your latest insightful thoughts less any revenue generating adverts, such as Google Adsense carrying publishers pay per click adverts, direct to the desktop of your readers. They will be able to read your full article in their feed reader and then move on to the next site. Meanwhile you have received no income for your hard work.

Over time this could be a good policy and allow you to build a community of regular readers but in the short term you could be harming your income.

Look at your web visitor logs to see what activity is recorded for your site. Do you see many single visits from IP addresses requesting your feed with no subsequent pages being served from your site?

This could be because your posts are not engaging your audience, it could be because they have no need to visit as you have just served up the full article without the need to visit you.

I suggest you change your feeds to be excerpts or partial text for a while and monitor the results. Do you now see feed requests followed by pages served to the same IP address? If you do you have been successful and you are serving your site plus adverts to your readership.

Monitoring is essential as you do not want to loose your readers so try this for a short while and review the results. Remember you will be posting new articles regularly, so if it has an adverse effect you can always revert bacjk to the previous feed structure.

Tags: rss feeds, adsense, blog income, google adsense, google

This is hot news as Google has not been keen to disclose adsense commission structures before and this has held back some sites from participating in the program. The costs of Internet Marketing with Pay Per Click programs is known but why join the publishing club when you have no idea of what the rewards will be and whether you will be fairly remunerated.

The article further states that the revenue from the search sites brings Google more revenue that the Adsense program as a result of this commission distribution.

I suspect that larger sites receive more commission and the smaller sites less with the 78.5 percent being the average. Notwitstanding this it appears that webmasters should give serious consideration to gaining additional revenue from participation in the program.

You have little to loose. Google distributing the lions share of the revenue and retaining less than 15 percent of the income in exchange for delivering contextual adverts to your site.

Tags: google adsense, adsense commission, adsense commission payments,