Search Engine Marketing Helps Drive Back-to-School Sales

Summer may just be starting, but advertisers that want to do well this back-to-school shopping season need to plan now to make the most of this really impressive annual consumer shopping event. In fact, at an estimated $72.5 billion in combined back-to…

The 10 Most Important Paid Search Developments So Far In 2014

It’s been a big year so far for product listing ads on both Google and Bing. Google started putting more ads in the Knowledge Graph. Bing followed Google’s lead on combining tablet and desktop traffic. And Google said it would begin stripping paid search queries from referrer strings….

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Bing Ads Expands Bid Landscape Estimator Tool To Ad Groups, Non-US Markets

In March, Bing Ads launched its Bid Landscape tool in the US — essentially equivalent to the Bid Simulator in Google AdWords. Now, Bing Ads is rolling out Bid Landscape to at the ad group level. Non-US advertisers also now have access to bid landscape at the keyword level. Bid Landscape shows…

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Microsoft Shuttering Bing Ads Express

Bing Ads Express, Microsoft’s program to encourage small businesses to adopt the paid search platform, will be sunsetted this summer. Launched just last October and modeled on Google’s own AdWords Express, the program was designed to simplify and automate paid search advertising across…

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Microsoft’s Catapult Project Aims To Speed Bing Search, Improve Relevancy

A major datacenter project at Microsoft could lead to faster and more relevant search results on the company’s 5-year-old search engine, Bing. The Catapult project is a collaboration between Microsoft researchers and the Bing team that was presented Monday at an industry conference on…

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MSFT: No Plans To Monetize Cortana Yet, But We Do Want Her To Be Pervasive

It’s far too early to consider monetizing Cortana, Microsoft’s new virtual personal assistant, but the company is already thinking about how to scale her across different devices, platforms and around the world. Those were two of the key points from Microsoft’s keynote…

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Bing Ads URL Auto-Tagging Finally Arrives

Rejoice, the Bing Ads team has finally rolled out one of its most-requested features — auto-tagging for ad destination URLs. When UTM tags are added to destination URLs on ads, the performance metrics can flow into Google Analytics. Until now, advertisers have had to manually add tag URLs or…

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Microsoft’s SMX Advanced Keynote: Cortana Makes People More Likely To Search

We’re ready to get started on day two of SMX Advanced, and today’s opening keynote promises to talk about the future of search. Microsoft’s Marcus Ash (Group Program Manager for Windows Phone) and Rob Chambers (Group Program Manager, Applications and Services Group) will be here…

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Bing Ads Tweaks Its Tune: Desktop/Tablet Traffic To Be Combined, Adding Tablet Bid Modifier

You may recall last spring, Bing Ads issued a manifesto of sorts in response to Google’s announcement of Enhanced Campaigns titled Advertisers Deserve Control: “We do not believe bundling mobile, desktop and tablet advertising together in an opaque manner is in the best interests of our…

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New Bing Ads Location Report Shows Whether Ads Were Triggered By Physical Location Or Location Interest

The Bing Ads team has added a new Geo Location report that offers more detail on the type of targeting methods used in serving your ads. The report is available under the list of Targeting reports via the Bing Ads API and the web UI.  Aptly named, the “Geo location (New version)” report…

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Bing Ads Launches Live Chat Support And Industry Insights Portal With Research, Case Studies

Today, the Bing Ads team announced the launch of live chat support and a new industry insights portal. Live Chat will be available at all hours every day of the week for in its English-language markets. Customers can use Live Chat to ask questions abou…

Bing Ads Gets Friendlier To Big Accounts: Now See Up To 50,000 Keywords In Web UI

Managing big accounts in the Bing Ads web UI has long had its challenges. The team is starting to change that.  Now, at the account, campaign and ad group level, paid search managers can now see performance data on as many as 50,000 keywords in the web interface of Bing Ads. The results used to…

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Why Yahoo’s Not Going To Steal The Search Default For iPhone Away From Google

Apparently Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wants to be the default search for Apple’s Safari browser on iPhone and iPad and has been preparing to make a solid pitch. Well, we all want things we can’t have, and I’d be incredibly surprised if Yahoo got its wish here. Kara Swisher over at…

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RKG: Q1 US Paid Search Up 17 Percent, Fueled By PLAs; Smartphones Drove Just 7 Percent Of Spend

RKG is out with its first quarter Digital Marketing Report today, showing US paid search spend increased 17 percent year-over-year. This echoes positive Q1 global growth trends reported by Covario (25 percent) and IgnitionOne (8 percent). Mobile device…

Part Siri, Part Google Now: Microsoft Announces “Cortana” Virtual Assistant

Rumored for months, Microsoft has formally announced its answer to Apple’s Siri and Google’s Voice Search/Google Now: Cortana. Danny Sullivan is at the Microsoft Build Conference and live blogging it. Cortana appears to be sassy like Siri and can perform many of the functions that…

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Bing Ads Releases Targeting Updates For Bing Ads Express

Bing Ads today announced several updates for its small business solution, Bing Ads Express. This is the first big series of updates since the Bing Ad Express service launched last October. Here’s the rundown on the new updates. The focus is on improved targeting options: Advertisers now have…

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Bing Ads Launches Product Ads In U.S., Mobile Version Now In Beta

After months of testing, Product Ads are now available through Bing Ads in the U.S. Like AdWords Product Listing Ads (PLA), Bing’s version are powered by merchant product feeds. The ads display on the Yahoo Bing Network for commerce-related searches and feature a product image, title, price…

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Bing Ads Now Shows Zero-Click Search Queries, Offers 20 To 40X More Data Than Before

Formerly dubbed the Search Query Report, Bing Ads has updated what’s now called the Search Term Report, which houses the data on the terms users actually typed before clicking on an ad. Included in the new release are results on zero-click search queries. These terms had been excluded from…

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