The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

One of our goals at Clickable is to provide a consistent interface for you to manage all of your ad network accounts, rather than forcing you to make subtle and hard-to-remember adjustments every time you switch from one search network to another. To that end, when you import Microsoft adCenter accounts into Clickable, you will need to make a few changes to standardize those campaigns and make them consistent with other search networks. Our wizards will guide you through the process, but here's a little bit more detail on what you'll see.

1. Start and end dates
In Microsoft adCenter, start and end dates are set for each individual ad group, rather than being set at the campaign level. To standardize your adCenter accounts with your other search marketing campaigns, we will set the same start and end date for all ad groups in your adCenter campaign, effectively setting start and end dates for that campaign. These fields are pre-populated with the earliest start date and latest end date of the ad groups in your campaign, but you're free to change them.

2. Daily budget
Microsoft adCenter is the only major search network that asks you to set a monthly budget for your campaign, rather than a daily budget. To help you manage your search marketing expenditures in a consistent manner, Clickable will enforce a daily budget for your adCenter campaigns. By default, it will be set to one-thirtieth of your monthly budget in Microsoft. You can adjust your daily budget in the Clickable conversion wizard.

3. Geo-targeting
Geo-targeting can be set for each individual ad group in Microsoft adCenter, rather than at the campaign level. In the third step of our conversion wizard, you can set location targets for your campaigns that will automatically be set to each ad group within that campaign, allowing you to manage adCenter location targeting at the campaign level, as in Google.

4. Default bids
Default keyword bids are set at the campaign level in adCenter, rather than the ad group level. Because ad groups often contain strongly-related clusters of keywords, this value is most often set at the ad group level. In this wizard, you will be able to set default search and (if relevant) content bids for each of the ad groups in your campaign.

5. Negative keywords
Negative keywords can be associated with campaigns, ad groups, or individual keywords in Microsoft adCenter, rather than being restricted to ad groups. To simplify keyword management, the final step in this wizard allows you to select negative keywords and apply them to your ad groups, as with Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing.