Utilizing its expertise in windows office, Microsoft‘s Advertising Intelligence is a great tool regarding keyword research and creation. The short story is, it could save you huge amount of time (compared with tools provided by Google) and still provide notable insights.
As a certified Microsoft adCenter member, SnapHawk would like to share some of the experience in using this great tool. Now, let’s play around with it using some live examples.
Popular keywords allow you to rank the keywords in the selected category by impression. You will see what are among the hottest topic in a certain category. For example, if we want to generate potential keywords for an education client. We simply click the popular keywords -> vertical category content list and then choose the "college/university" category. Here is the screenshot of the keywords represent people's interest in college education.
Under this example, if the school has a marketing objective to drive traffic, using the popular keywords such as school calendar, online college obviously helps.
Keyword researchThe keyword research tool tells you the demographic information and geographic information about the search user.
For instance, if I am interested to know what kind of people would like to search the keyword “online education”, simply type the keyword you want to analyze in excel and click demographic function. here is the screen shot of the result.
Geographic
Demographic
Keyword | Age0_12 | Age13_17 | Age18_24 | Age25_34 | Age35_49 | Age50_64 | Age65Plus | Female | Male | Date Range |
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online college | 0.94% | 3.77% | 19.81% | 41.51% | 22.64% | 6.60% | 4.72% | 50.00% | 50.00% | 10/2008-10/2008 |
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We can see Texas people (maybe because the area has fewer school) and people who aged between 25-34 (maybe because they just enter the job market and feel like needing more education?) are more likely to search the keyword. Therefore in our Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign, a higher bid for the right audience according to this information will help us to improve our Return On Investment (ROI).
The pricing tool allows you to gain an overview of the average performance and Cost Per Click (CPC) of a keyword in both the search network and content network. Take the keyword online college for example
In the search network, an Exact search type presents a higher Click Through Rate (CTR), and of course, resulting in a higher CPC. In this case, we will suggest clients to bid different prices for the different match types.
However, the keyword’s performance in content network is not as high as in search network. We might also notice that compared to Google, Microsoft has limited content partners. (So their price is low and our clients could adopt it if the objective is not CTR but as many clicks as possible).
The vertical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tools enable you to learn more about how keywords in your specific business perform against other business, and in both the search network and the content network. For example, here is how sub-categories in education compare with each other under various variables.
Apparently the reference works has a higher clicks as well as impressions. This can help a business operates across industry to allocate their budget in a higher level. As SnapHawk, a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) agency, we will make sure to check the changes from time to time to ensure a most up-to-date results, regarding which category driving more CTR and CPC.
Forecasting Keywords Performance
As a SEM agency who continuously helps our clients in choosing keywords over time, Advertising Intelligence makes this process efficient to track. For “online college” again, here is the monthly results about number of searches. Microsoft also enables users to observe this day by day. Another thing worth-mentioning is that by default, Microsoft helps to forecast three months worth of search traffic.
In some cases, seasonality could be possibly observed if using data mining function in excel.
Post by: Elin Weng
