Webanalyticsbook usually has stuff in his blog that I don't get to read (except in his blog - or because he told me about it - that's Sebastian Wenzel who's also a friend of mine and on the Social Media Committee of the WAA).

In this case, segmentation by three level deep is just another way of saying segmentation using 3 dimensions (makes sense, doesn't it?)/

"..Segmenting Three Deep

It’s a good suggestion to segment any key performance indicator to a level three deep in order to understand the meaning of the statistic in greater detail. We’ve already segmented by search engine referrer and by keyword but what if your ad group has several different ads, each with different ad copy and a slightly different appeal? Wouldn’t it be helpful to know which ad is driving sales and which is simply costing you money?

It’s almost a trivial matter for you to add another adCenter parameter to your destination URLs which now looks like this:

www.example.com/LandingPage.html?keyword={Keyword}&adid={AdID}

Now the same keyword can be tracked separately for each ad, providing insight into the effectiveness of your ad copy. What could be more actionable than knowing which ad is generating revenue-and how much?”

Entire segmentation post here"

For example, if you have referrers by keyword to a page, that's one dimension (or two, it depends on the analytics package) if you add if it's a new visitor vs a repeat visitor, that's 2 dimensions - and if you add geolocation (ie: New York State) that's 3 dimensions.

Trick is, to do meaningful marketing analysis you need at least 3 dimensions, perhaps 4 or 5 would be even better but most analytics packages, except the high end one's only are 2 dimensional - you can get one thing charted aginst something else, but not the third thing.

Finally, one of my ideas, one that I approached Microsoft with almost two years ago at Webmasterword Pubcon in Boston in 2006, is happening - Microsoft Adds More Tools for Search Marketers

"..Microsoft today launched the adCenter Add-in for Excel and adExcellence accreditation program for search advertisers, and a new Webmaster Center for organic search optimizers."

"…One tool that will come out of adCenter Labs and into production next month is the adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007. The add-in lets users conduct keyword research and plan keyword strategy from within an Excel spreadsheet, using attributes like relevance, historical cost information and projected volume. It's designed to help advertisers understand keyword popularity and trends, and gain insight on demographic and localization information of actual queries.

"It's designed to help our advertisers become more knowledgeable about their customer base," Colborn said. "As a search engine, we have a lot of data on a keyword. The goal here is to work with our advertisers to provide a toolset they can use to access that data in an easy-to-use fashion."

Many advertisers are already using Excel to work with keyword data from third-party sources, so it only made sense for Microsoft to create a tool that allows them to work with data directly in Excel, he said.

I did a bit of keyword research last year using AdCenter and found myself wishing for a tool to do planning with in Excel - now I'm glad they finally moved in that direction and provided it.

I had spoken to several people at Microsoft about it at the time - but this is the first I've heard of any of the ideas I have had, materializing, in regards to Microsoft. 

I saw the ad on my sitemeter dashboard lately while looking at Webmetricsguru.com's traffic … but I already have an AdCenter account.  The deal, according to Sebastian at WebAnalyticsBook.  There's a lot of times I wish my Sitemeter account was a premium account because only the last 100 referrals are saved (pretty much the last hundred of anything except overall numbers of visits and pageviews, etc).

"…Sign up with MSNs Adcenter (for $5 setup fee) and get $50 in free clicks plus a free Sitemeter Premium account for 1 year.

So even if you are not interested in a web analytics solution this might be a good way to start with Adcenter. Also if you don’t want to spend any money for a web analytics premium service this is an easy way to test their service.

 

 

I had not gotten around to read my iMediaConnection newsletter for a couple of days but Make the Leap to Demographic Targeting by Brian Kaminski  brought up this point that jumped out at me:

"…Recently, my team tested the impact of demographic targeting with MSN using Microsoft's demographic profiling capabilities within adCenter. Fortunately, our client had a very good understanding of their ideal customer, both in terms of age and gender. This information proved advantageous because it allowed us to single out this group and treat them differently — without the need to go on a calculated fishing expedition in order to determine our desired audience. 

When MSN was able to determine that someone in our target group was searching on one of our keywords, we were able to increase our bids to display that ad at the top of the results. We were also able to try different types of ad creative that would only be displayed to users with our specified demographics.

Overall, the results were quite impressive. By placing ourselves directly in front of our desired audience with a special message, we were able to improve our results and watch both our conversion rate and raw number of conversions increase during the test. In the end, the client was extremely pleased with the results and the lesson they gained.  "

I was trying to get my former house plans client to do just that….but they had their head, or something else, stuck in the ground and preferred to unload several thousand dollars a month on AdWords and Yahoo PPC that usually had them losing 75 cents on every dollar spent, according to KeywordMax.   Even when I showed them the data - they would not accept it.   Look, if some narrow-minded architects want to make Google and Yahoo rich, who's the say they can't?..but I'm glad I'm not working with them.

But clearly, if there ever was a product that needs demographic profiling - its' house plans.

But as Brian Kaminski pointed out - there's also much more work needed to firm up the quality of online profiles.

"…To test my theory, I performed a survey — admittedly unscientific — of the people I work with. As I suspected, many of them maintain alternate aliases for various online activities, confirming my theory that improving the accuracy of online profiles will go a long way in boosting the effectiveness of demographic targeting"

But that brings up another interesting point and a potential problem - because if you can get the audience demographics to be much more accurate - you might run into not having enough of the right audience to show an ad.  Hmm…interesting problem - which means that portals like Microsoft Live - will need to gain more marketshare in order to be fully effective - and right now, the big G, stands in the way of that. 

Besides, Google might end up outdoing Microsoft for Demographic profiling.. you never know.  Maybe Google Labs has a secret project going on right now ..and no one knows it yet.  I'm just speculating.

My point - if you increase profile quality by getting rid of a lot of noise and false positives in a demographic group as Microsoft is defining in via the Experian Mosaic system, you're going to run into, in many cases, a shortage of qualified eyeballs…that's all I'm saying … and Microsoft needs to come up with a plan to address it now - because profiling will continue to improve - as will the ability of advertisers to target their audiences - it will become more specific as time goes on.

SearchEngineLand reports of a Major Microsoft adCenter Bug Costs Millions

"… normally would not report bugs like these but the adCenter blog just posted an official confirmation of the bug I reported early this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable. The bug is that advertisers were being charged astronomical prices per click, even though they have set their bids lower.

One example is an advertiser set a bid price of 50 cents as was charged over $280. There are many other cases, even some of advertisers being charged over a thousand dollars for one click."

Thought PPC prices were inflated but not by this much!

The last two Microsoft AdCenter tools I'm looking at are entirely new for this platform - video interactive hyperlink and social video.

The first tool is not a new idea - I hyperlink over objects in videos that tell you about the object.  NO big deal - saw graduate students doing projects like this at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU.

The second tool, Social Video, is much more interesting to me.  Here's what Microsoft says the tool does:

"…This tool allows you to share personal videos, view or add comments to videos that others have shared. For example, imagine that you have video footage of your first skydiving attempt. Let your friends know what you were thinking about when you jumped out of the plane! You can search for videos by typing keywords, or view only the video frames that interest you by selecting the relevant keyword tags. Select a video to play. "

There was not much to look at so I'll hold off saying anything about this tool yet.

Yet the is a Tag Cloud created by looking at what is being spoken.

Again, this is another tool that I'm not convinced is very useful - and Microsoft is showing it off - The Detecting Geographical Location tool tries to figure out the location of what is being described (see below). 

I used the query "brooklyn artists gym"

First of all, the tool was wrong - the location of my Studio is in Brooklyn, New York, not New York City, NY, US.  However, that being put to one side - search engines might be able to do analysis of your content to figure out what it's about and this is one example of that capability.

As a tool, not sure it's of any use to me, at this time, however.

I'm not sure this tool is that useful, but if we take group of competitors can we find something on a page that Search Engines  might flag as sensitive material?  Microsoft's AdCenter Lab Detecting Sensitive Web pages tool attempts to figure out if your page as any offensive material on it.

Here's some sites I'm familiar with and what their scores are:

What!  My Pet Supply client has something on the home page that might be objectionable?  I wonder if that's true of other pet sites?

So now, the question is ….what do you do if the tool finds something objectionable but there's nothing clearly objectionable?   I guess you can keep changing you page on a test server and then when you got what you want and the sensitivity score is ok, you can republish.

Again, not sure how useful this tool is - but it's interesting to have it in my toolbox of possibilities anyway.

I was happy to see the AdLabs Search Funnel tool updated by Microsoft from 22.9 thousand keywords to 4.3 million and now I can find more data on what people searched in MSN Live before using a keyword and what they searched on after they used a specific keyword phase (see below for "Pet Supplies").

I combined the incoming and outgoing search funnels to save space and personally, I wish AdLabs did that for me.  Honestly, I don't know how much use a funnel report like this one is - but they look useful - except I might want to include "pet supplies plus" in my advertising, etc.

One thing that still bothers me about these keyword "funnel reports" is the small numbers of queries being detected (IE: for "pet supplies") and the large number of variations on what people search for.

While reading WebAnalyticsBook today a rumor surfaced about a new Microsoft AdCenter Editor product - or a downloadable version of AdCenter - not sure which.  Since I'm not really involved with Paid Advertising that much - I quickly read the post which covered AdCenter Labs Third Annual Demo Fest - I quickly went over to  http://adlab.msn.com to look for myself and what changed.

In fact, here's the official fact sheet on all the new AdLabs changes.  About 80% of the tool set is the same as before, so I won't go over that part.  Here's what I found interesting about the new or improved offerings:

Under the Paid Search Offerings there's a new Keyword Forcast Tool that allows for the impression count and demographic predictions for a set of keywords:

I could have provided a nicer chart but numbers were easier to put in this blog post.

What's interesting - the peak demand for Pet Supplies is in September - but I'm not sure I agree with gender assignments as my research shows a 70% Female audience for Pet Supplies while Microsoft's tool shows closer to the reverse.  Don't bet the bank on tools like this - but it's interesting to look at anyway.

In may next post I'll cover another of the new Microsoft AdLabs tools.