So I talked to a source at Adcenter today and heard they are finally about to release a decent upload tool.  If you have ever tried to upload a campaign with multiple orders you have found out that you can’t.  You have to first create the order, then upload the ad, then upload the keywords.  If you have a campaign with 50 orders, it’s an all day effort. So this change will be greatly welcomed.  This should be the final piece of the puzzle to make Adcenter really usable.

Last week posted some initial thoughts about the new Yahoo PPC interface. After spending about a week playing around with it, I can definitely now give it the thumbs up. They have improved it about 1000% from their old version. The reporting and graphing system is awesome. Hands down the best of any PPC network. It is super quick to get a snapshot of the performance for all your adgroups or keywords. So the big question is what PPC interface is the best out of the big 3 now?

I’d have to say Yahoo and Google are now tied. In fact the new Yahoo system kind of makes Adwords show its age a bit. The only big advantage Adwords has is it’s offline editor. I almost exclusively use the offline editor in Adwords. Yahoo if you are listening, how about starting work on your own offline editor? That might push you into my #1 slot. Oh ya, I guess that puts MSN in third

I upgraded to the eagerly anticipated “Panama” the other day. This is the loooong overdue update to Yahoo’s sponsored search interface.

Here are some of my random thoughts:

The interface has a slick flash feel to it, and it works well in Firefox.

The Geo-targeting with map-based interface is awesome. You can now target right down to the city level. The only negative is that you still can’t target other countries like the UK without having a separate Yahoo UK account.

When you are entering keywords, it has a tool which essentially a keyword scraper. You just input a URL and it pulls keywords from the page. Nice, Yahoo is going black hat!

When you are entering your bid prices it has a slider bar that shows you how your bid affects your number of clicks, as well are you estimated position and share of clicks. Slider bars are always a crowd pleaser.

You can enter Google like strings while entering your keywords. For example:

hawaii trip**1.75**http://travel.yahoo.com**trips to Hawaii**N

I just started playing with their analytics tracking but it definitely looks promising. You even have the ability to track keyword assists. (more on assists in another post to come).

I would like to see more match types, instead of the standard and advanced.

The bulk upload via spreadsheet is great.

Since this blog is brand new, it would be nice to start getting visitors to post. I figured what better way than giving stuff away. So the best comment between now and the end of the month will get this shiny new $50 Adwords coupon. More good stuff is to come every couple weeks, so please hit the RSS button to subscribe!

Well, we are back from Pubcon 2006 and digging in to the pile of work that accumulated in our absence. It was a lot to take in and my head is still swimming about everything that happened.  I’m not really a big schwag hound at conventions, but if it’s offered to me I’ll take it.  That being said, it was quite a haul of freebies including about 6 or 7 shirts, Google orbs, various toys, a cool screwdriver/flashlight tool,  tons of pens, bags, 2 hats, Adwords coupons, MSN Adcenter coupons, and lots of other junk.  I plan to give a lot of this stuff away on this blog once people start actually finding it.

Of course, by far the most important item I got was information.  I just need to wade through my pretty extensive notes now and start putting some of the knowledge gained to good use.  Webmaster world put on a very well run event, my compliments to Brett and his crew.  I was wondering before hand if the $1K plus that it cost with travel and hotel would be worth it, but I can definitely say yes it was.  I will be back next year. 

I was going to post a bunch of pictures from the show, but unfortunately after leaving my camera on my kitchen table in my rush to make my flight, that won’t happen.  I did manage to snap this one shot from my phone (sorry for the quality-it’s a phone) of something I found really interesting and falls into that “only in Vegas” category.  Who knew that in Vegas you could buy Ipods out of a vending machine!!

Greetings from Vegas!  I can tell I am going to need a vacation by the time this week is over!  One of the more interesting sessions I attended today was on PPC tracking and reconciliation.  One of Goggle’s senior Adwords dudes talked about the 5 biggest myths about the Adwords quality score.  Since everyone was asking tons of questions about quality score, it was good to put some of the misconceptions to rest.

Myth 1:  There is only one quality score in your account.

Truth:  There are many different quality scores for different aspects of your account.

Myth 2:  Using all 3 match types increases your quality score.

Truth:  False.  Match types are not a factor.

Myth 3:  Increasing your spend can increase your score.

Truth:  Nope, you can’t buy your way to better listings.

Myth 4:  High CTR = High quality score

Truth:  This is not always the case.  It depends on where your ad is being shown. 

Myth 5:  Optimizing your account deletes your quality score history.

Truth:  Restructuring you account and changing adgroups around do not affect quality score as your history used for score calculations are saved.

Chad and I off our to catch our flight to Vegas for Pubcon 2006.  It is my first conference, so I am looking forward to learning a lot in all the sessions.  Hopefully we can post some good information nightly.  Seems like a good time to launch this blog, as we might find some interesting content to post there!

We have thought of doing a blog for a while but with so many projects going, it was always on the back burner.  Finally we launched the thing.  It’s nothing fancy as you can see, just a place to post some info that might be helpful or interesting to users of the directory.  Hope you enjoy!