Download the MSN adExcellence Exam ebook free. Tell your friends. Do not spend any time watching video after video after video. It’s the guide to passing with as little time as possible dedicated to studying.

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The adCenter full length video training center doesn’t have ANY text versions, but it does have the handy “start the test” button at the bottom.

To start:
Have or create a Windows Live ID to take the exam. And create a profile.

Benefits of passing the exam are a logo/badge. Companies with 3 more individuals that pass it become members of the adExcellence Membership Directory a very bare bones looking directory of 1,000 members. (It looks like if you leave your company space blank it’ll sort you towards the top on the first page.)

It costs $50. It’s 100 questions long over a 90 minute time period. A passing score (80% or higher) is only good for a year and then you have to take it again.

The nice thing is once you pass, it does tell you what your pass rate was per section of the test.

And now, all 7 sections in order- and yes each one at the bottom links to one before and after it. Happy studying!

Part 1: Introduction to Microsoft adCenter
Part 2: Getting Started
Part 3: Targeting
Part 4: Tracking Ad Performance
Part 5: Optimizing Ad Performance
Part 6: Microsoft adCenter Budgeting and Billing
Part 7: Microsoft adCenter Desktop (Beta)

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Just so you know- not a single question came up (for me anyway) on the exam regarding this section. If you’re looking to save yourself 40mins, this is a good place to do it. (It is listed as Beta after all.) If you don’t know how to use the Desktop tool- this is a good resource to view.

Microsoft adCenter Desktop Overview (5:11)

This section shows you how to install and navigate the user interface and what it is, why you would want it.

Find the link for the download under the Tools tab in your adCenter account, click on it, download, run and follow the installation wizard.

Open the account from your desktop, sign in with your adCenter login (click remember me- so you don’t have to keep logging in) and off you go.

The tutorial then goes through all the items on the “Task based ribbon” summarizing what the Home, Manage and Research tabs can do.

The “Quick Access Toolbar” cuts the icons off in the screenshot tutorial but you can make a best guess and utilize it to switch users, import/export and access resources.

The Browser Pane shows you your accounts. Select one account at a time and click on folders to expand and click an item to have it show up in the Manager pane.

The Manager Pane is the main window/workspace

To filter- select View and choose from the drop down list. This is also where you can do multiple changes or advanced copy and paste.

The Editor Pane is the pane below Manager where you can change details like budget, targeting, exclusions, dates, bids, find/replace feature.

The Dashboard- on the far right sidebar – is where you can save your “favorite campaigns and ad groups.” I barely looked at this.

Account Basics (8:17)

Skip the first 4 slides, it’s just a rehash of what it is and what the “learning objectives” will be.

Subscribing to account shows you how to add accounts and to “sync” them (as few or as a many at a time) so that your Editor uploads the newest information from your adCenter account. Watch for the size of data expected to be uploaded…

Sync up whatever account it is you’re going to be working first…then work on it, then sync again.

The conflicts view will show you only items with conflicts, i.e. data from the web UI not matching up with the desktop editor. Click on the conflict in question and adCenter will ask you which version of the data to keep- select and apply changes.

The tutorial then goes through all the different symbols and what the different fonts and colors means. For example a strikethrough is something that is deleted, same with the black “X” mark. Look for green plus signs, black X, red X, italics and bold fonts.

Notifications Stacks are shown when the manager pane is set to All- and will prevent you from syncing all changes and needs to be remedied. Basically it’s a list of errors you have to address in order to move on.

Exporting and Importing (6:22)

Specifically how to import and export Google AdWords files to adCenter Desktop.

The acceptable file formats are CSV, Tab delimited and Excel Workbooks.

Export AdCenter data by right clicking the item to be exported and click “Export” along with where to save the file.

Export Google AdWords data and save as a CSV- edit in Excel.
What you really need to know:

Setting default values for your adCenter account- go to the big red Desktop button and click Desktop Options- Advanced- under Campaigns/Ad Groups etc; set the default options you want applied when importing. THIS will save you a lot of time if you are importing multiple campaigns/adgroups.

Importing Campaigns
Click Import- use the Import Wizard, select the source from where the file will come. Google, Yahoo, AdCenter or Excel spreadsheet.

Once the file is uploaded, select the appropriate columns above the imported data.

Account Management Top Tips (7:05)

First up, 3 slides of introduction that you should skip.

1st tip- Copy and Paste. Like campaigns, right click, copy and paste into the account where you want them to go. Everything is copied- and applies to ad groups, ads, keywords etc;

2nd tip- Multiple Changes wizard- example of creating and editing keyword list, highlight keywords, click copy to Excel, make changes in Excel, copy the keyword data, open the wizard and select the ad group destination. Paste the data into the wizard.

When you paste, it’ll grab the headers from Excel as well, see “The first row contains column headings” box.

3rd tip- Find and Replace. Click the Replace button, change the word you want to change in Find and then replacement text. Be sure to select what ads etc; you want to perform this on so that it’s in the Manager pane so the Find/Replace can work it’s magic.

4th tip- Opt into Match Types- adding match types to your current keyword list, select the keywords, right click and select which match type to add for those keywords.

5th tip- Advanced Search and Filter- Click “Advanced” and chose from the drop down menu that you want to filter by (so match type for example) select filter (like exact or contains) and then you can add an “Add Criteria” if needed to add additional filters.

Desktop Customization (4:50)

How to set default values (which we already went over), date ranges, defaults and columns.

Default values- set through the red AdCenter Desktop Button- as we went over Exporting & Importing but with more screenshots.

Default keyword bids- at the ad group level- basically the max CPC for the ad group. They’re just calling it something else.

Manager columns- arrange which columns show. Click Columns in the Manager pane and select what columns you want.

Custom date ranges- Click the date range button and select Custom (the last custom date range you ran is held here until you run another). Unfortunately it’s still limited to a max of 31 consecutive days, no more than 2 years in the past. Click download statistics.

Desktop Campaign Optimization (9:04)

I see the light at the end of this tunnel….last one.

Research tab- Group of keyword tools to expand: similar, extracted, frequent and category. Demographic tools for traffic, age and gender. And the keyword bids estimation tool.

Keyword Generation Tools- select a group or ad group of keywords and start clicking tools depending on what you’re after:
Similar Keywords- displays a list of terms similar to a word or phrase you enter.

Extracted Keywords- displays a list of keywords from a webpage URL you enter.

Frequent Keywords- displays a list of terms that were most frequently used in search queries during the previous month.

Category Keywords- displays a list of terms associated with a business category you select.

Tutorial then walks through using the similar keywords tool. It’s pretty self explanatory- but does provide impression data as well, select and add to ad group. It is nice that you can select WHERE from a drop down menu of where the terms will go, ad group, ad group or campaign negatives.

Flip around keyword generation tools from the drop down menu while conducting all your research.

It then continues on to each kind and how to use the generation tool. If you’ve used this before at all – skip this part.

Keyword Intelligence Tools
Monthly Traffic- display the number of times each keyword was used as a search term for the previous three months.

Age Demographic- displays the percentage of total searches on each keyword made by people in six age ranges.

Gender Demographic- displays the percentage of searches on keywords made by males and females. (And people of unreported gender.)

Keyword Bid Estimation Tool
Select one or more keywords in the manager pane, click the estimation tool button, see positions 1-3 with the corresponding bid to attain that position.

Bulk Targeting
Select multiple campaigns in the manager pane, click “targeting” in the editing pane and go to town on the edits you want to make.(They also show how to apply incremental bidding as well). Click OK.

Copying Targeting
Select campaign you want to copy, right click, copy and select campaign that you want copy targeting for. Right click, paste special. In the paste settings box check the radio button for what you want to paste.

THE END. This means you are now ready to take the MSN AdExcellence exam!

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Microsoft adCenter Budgeting (2:08)

This two minute video just goes over the different options: divide across the month or per day or the spend until depleted with definitions.

Daily budget is a “target” and the actual spend will very and works best if you want to make regular changes to your budget.

Spend until depleted- is what it is.

Divide across the month- daily budget is calculated by AdCenter by total remaining amount/number of days left in the month. This is the one where you can hit a “budget pause” at the end of the month.

Bidding (2:56)

This section goes over what a max CPC is (which by part 6, you know by now) and how the bidding works in relation to monthly budget and placement on the page where the ad appears in a search result.

Options: bid by match type, same for all keyword, individual keywords or incremental bids.

Content network: set the same bid for all placements or for separate placements.

Use the bid estimation tool- or the bid to position 1 tool to see estimated costs and traffic:

Then the video goes over (again) how to change or update bids after an ad group has been created.

Microsoft adCenter Billing (1:50)

This section goes over specifically how adCenter billing works. Specifically to note when you start your account, that day is your “billing cycle” day. On that day every month you card is charged whatever is outstanding and this day CANNOT be changed.

The billing threshold is assigned per account, per your credit limit- assigned to your account. The credit card threshold starts at $50, then $100, $500, $1,000 or you can hit that friendly “bill me now” button any time.

So a brand new credit card account will be billed at $50, then $100 and so on until you’ve established the credit to go a whole month (if you don’t hit $1,000) that you’ll be automatically billed on your “billing cycle day.”

PayPal is an accepted form of payment as well and be sure to check your alert panel for any billing issues. You can change to PayPal at any time.

They then go into where to go in your account to see billing statements, your threshold, cycle day, invoice numbers.

Since they actually threw this last slide in as “key points to remember” I put it in here as well:

Ready for MSN AdExcellence tutorial #7?

Need to check out MSN AdExcellence tutorial #5?

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Campaign Optimization (6:01)

The bottom line of this video is really is how to spend more with MSN and the answer is: increase everything as it pertains to optimization.

The video starts out by defining optimization as it pertains to PPC, encourages you to run performance reports and gives sample scenarios of issues and possible solutions.

For example: high amount of impressions, but a low amount of clicks. The answer being to run some traffic reports and review the detailed data and the following strategy suggestions:

Additional example- a toy seller with a low number of impressions, possible causation issues could be:

Just something to note as a direct quote from the video: “Her CTR may be too low for her ads to be displayed.” Meaning that unless people are clicking your ad, your ad could get dinged- even though the base issue to begin with is that there are a low number of impressions to show for.

Users are encouraged to use the Keyword Research and Mutation tools to expand keyword lists.

Additional troubleshooting options for strategies to increase impressions:

Troubleshooting example given for low ROI

And last, but not least- an underutilized budget. Suggestions being to increase the bid, increase the number of keywords and apply targeted bidding. Using the keyword bid estimator for bid estimates, keyword tool to add keywords and targeted bidding to increase exposure to more searchers.

Ad Optimization Best Practices (8:04)

MSN recommends when testing your ads, you need to have at least 3 ads per ad group running. They also recommend that you allow 3 weeks to allow the ad group to gather enough data before changing anything or 1,000 impressions, whichever comes first.

Ad testing tactics should address your audience, business type, product or service and your specific needs.

Now please enjoy this chart of ad copy elements that you could be testing which seems include staring off in the distance as a tactic:

MSN asks you to consider your advertising goals- advertisers with branding goals are driving for impressions, where advertisers with ROI goals, hinge on CTR metrics. (This assume that you don’t have analytics within the adCenter interface going and will be using only the available stats to work with.)

Delete poor performing ads (don’t forget to check your ad position first) so that the best performing ads get more impressions. Same goes for bids and ad relevance when determining which ad to delete.

Set up “Succeeding Tests” -where the top performing ad becomes the control and new ad copy is created based on the control with 1 variable.

Know that you should always delete under performing ads and create new ads, rather than editing a poor performing ads. The poorer ad retains the previous ad’s performance history.

Have at least 2 ads in each ad group- preferably one static and one dynamic.

Ad Copy Best Practices (9:24)

Identify the key elements of ad copy- editorial style, dynamic text, unique selling proposition, branding and calls to action.

There is then a rehash of the editorial guidelines in regards to correct spelling, grammar, language, superlatives and using of common abbreviations and punctuation.

Dynamic text is also revisited again in the context of ad best practices, which gave us the statistic for the not so recent study anymore:

Know the difference and benefits between keyword insertion vs. parameter insertion.

Keyword insertion, inserts the exact keyword into the ad, makes the ad relevant and is easy and immediate.

Parameter insertion, customizes the keyword for proper grammar, capitalization, spelling, keeps the ad in character limits and can use different values.

Know the ad limits, 25 characters for title, 70 for the body and to provide default text for dynamic text.

From here, they go into customer profiling, knowing what your customer demographics are, the service/product attributes, brand and the call to action that will attract them. In particular, they mention income, age, gender, location and lifestyle behavior- some of which is tied into demographic and geographic reporting in the research tab and point you to researching your customers through 3rd party market research like industry research reports.

Unique Selling Points is the next slide which gives examples for their suggested USPs to feature like: low prices and discounts, special offers, product attributes and customer service. (I have to admit the MSN ads in this way are more creative than anything I’ve seen on Google for examples.)

Calls to Action– MSN actually mentions “click here” as a generic call to action, but not against the editorial guidelines and encourages users to use more specific calls like buy, join, reserve or subscribe. Including using creative/descriptive words in the ads:

MSN also covers seasonality for ad copy, but what it more interesting it the recommendation to create a “mirror” ad group for seasonality and instead of pausing non-seasonal ads in an ad group and adding new ones for the duration of the holiday, a totally new ad group with the same keywords, seasonal ad copy and pausing the non-seasonal ad group.

And of course, the inclusion of keywords in the ad copy- particularly mentioning “search query repetition” where the keyword appears in the ad title and body copy.

Dynamic Text Best Practices (6:39)

This is a bit of a refresher from before, what is dynamic text, where it appears, why you’d use it and character limits. And then they bring up again, the 38% increase in CTR when it’s in the ad vs. when it’s not.

If you struggle with MSN’s dynamic/param text system, I recommend watching at least sides 5, 6 and 7 in this video. This video walks through the different params as well: the destination and keyword level ones. What you really need is this chart to make the distinction on which one to use:

Know that for dynamic insertion to always use relevant placeholder text and that you cannot control capitalization, but you can with params. MSN recommends not using adjectives and verbs as part of a keyword when using dynamic text. If you do want to do that, set up a separate ad group to avoid poorly written looking ads. Like the keyword “cheap car” and an ad with the dynamic headline of “buy cheap {keyword}” coming out like “buy cheap cheap car.”

Quality Advertising Experiences (7:21)

This entire video is basically outlining how not to ruin the Microsoft brand with your crappy or spammy ads as it is the “intent of the MSN AdCenter commitment to quality advertising experiences.”

Ad Position- this section seems very out of place in this specific video. It outlines that the ad position factors are bid, quality and CTR performance to decide if your ad goes in the mainline or right rail and in which position. Best practices for improving your ad rank: increase your CPC amount, improve ad copy (with keywords), landing page and match type.

Know that the quickest boost to improve your ad rank- bid more. (Yes, throwing money at the problem does help.)

The rest of the video is a rehash of products/features already covered but now in the context where MSN asks that your account or ads not be a giant mess and ruin Bing search results. Skip it.

Ready for MSN AdExcellence tutorial #6?

Missed MSN AdExcellence tutorial #4?

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Microsoft Adcenter Reports (3:22)

This section just explains where to find the reporting features and what kinds of reports where are.

• There are 3 types of reports: Delivery, Budget and Targeting.
• Set basic settings, then do optional advanced settings for additional accounts, columns and layout.
• Create templates and schedule them if desired. Report email is generated and sent to you with a link- which means you need to login to adCenter to review it.
• The report center holds the 20 most recent run.
• “Rich visual charts” and tables are the benefits of these reports for account optimization and effectiveness.

Where is my adCenter Ad? (14:54)

This one is pretty epic in size. It’s basically the video they’d like everyone to watch before calling the 1-800 number for help and goes over several scenarios in which you might not see your ad and what to do if so.

• The process is: ad submitted, ad reviewed, ad approved, ad goes live.
• If the ad is not approved there is an email notice. Be sure to wait a “few hours” after submittal before checking to see if you ad is live or not yet.

Know these reasons on why you might not see your ads:

• quality based ad rank is lower than competitor’s ads
• minimum ad performance threshold isn’t being met
• targeting options not correct
• daily/monthly budget has been reached
• ad group/campaign has passed its end date

• Use the ad preview tool to see ads before they are live.

Then we dive a little deeper on the above reasons for not being able to find your ad.

• Check for impressions- if the “data summary table” on the user interface dashboard is blank, run a delivery report to see if the account/campaign/ad group in question has registered any impressions.
• Improve your quality based ad rank- the basic answer to this one is to increase bids. You can do an update of performance estimates and see if upping the bid will assist with the problem or not.
• Search queries- if you’re bidding on exact, consider changing the match type to increase impressions.
• Targeting- check the time, geography, language first. Bing users are displayed to and grouped by IP address, along with language settings.
• If the account has zero impressions- check that the account status is active and that the credit card is also active. If a credit card is rejected, it is tried 3 times total and then if unsuccessful, goes on credit hold. To undo this, add a different credit card or call adCenter support. This type of incident will show up in the alerts panel on the dashboard.
• Several times through out the video they mentioned to make sure that something isn’t deleted, or set to pause like a credit card, account or keyword list. This must be a common issue.
• Budget pause occurs when your campaign has spent more or is spending more than allowed to stay on track for the monthly budget. To remove a budget pause, increase the budget to 20% more and the campaign with restart. The cycle will begin anew again on the first of the following month with the new budget in place.
• If anything is expired, deleted, paused, disapproved or draft- it won’t show.

Editorial Review (11:30)

Another whopper of a video- but this is one of the few worth the watch. I wish they would actually take out some of the great graphs/charts they have in here and put them in the Help Center.

• If there is an editorial issue as you are creating ads etc; an “inline editorial guidelines” popup box will list out what the issues are.
• There is a rehash of the disapproved notifications, where they are and what is emailed and what isn’t.
• There is a great chart for Table of Editorial Review that has descriptions of editorial issues and solutions to solve them.
• In the user interface, look to the ads and keyword status columns to see feedback and a flyout box to click and see links on how to fix the issue being flagged.
• Items that can fail editorial review pertain to style, grammar, punctuation, misspellings and disallowed characters like – [ ] @ * < = >. The takeaway tip is that if you’re going to bid on misspellings with dynamic text use the param function over the keyword one.
• Know that abbreviations are OK as long as they are common usage.
• Phone numbers are not allowed in title or text unless it’s part of the company name.
• Appealing a disapproval- go to the Help Page in adCenter and click “more help” to get support via email or phone.
• Support can take up to 10 business days.
• If the disapproved goes through the request for exception and is denied twice, the decision is final and cannot be appealed again.

Campaign Analytics (12:18)

So I forgot to watch this one before I took the test. I still passed easily, so that should give you some insight…plus the tutorial breaks after slide #6-9, which if you sit and wait for a full minute, it comes back in, for each slide, unfortunately. It does pick up the regular load time for slides 10-11 though. (Yes, I tried viewing in Firefox and IE.) AND also unfortunately- if you are planning on utilizing their analytics this is a video you should watch from start to finish.

• The first few slides are selling points on why you analytics are important (to measure ROI).
• Definitions of conversion, conversion tracking, analytics, tracking code.
• Where/how to “enable” tracking (check the checkbox for starters) where MSN will generate the tracking code.
• If you click the “limit to individual campaign conversions only” the system won’t track what they call “additional stats” like revenue and cost. This option must also be enabled manually for each campaign that you want it to apply to.
• Paste the code into the pages you want to track.
• NOT checking the “limit” checkbox means that the tracking option will apply to all campaigns in the account.

Creating Goals

• Click “create goal” and name it appropriately (like purchase or sign up). A goal can have up to 6 steps to get to the goal, the only required step is the conversion step.

• There are 3 types of steps:
• Land- of which there can only be one per goal, it’s the page where the visitor lands.
• Browse- there can be up to 5 of these, they are the pages visitors pass through on their way to a specific page.
• Prospect- a page that a visitor visits that indicates a conversion is likely- i.e. placing an item in a shopping cart. There can be up to 5 prospect steps.

Revenue and cost tracking for conversion steps

This is where you assign revenue/cost values for the steps. There are three types: none, constant and variable. Do not put in any currency symbols.

Constant- is when your value for the conversion stays the same, like a fee, a single product etc; When you run the report for goals, the system takes this value as the sale value and multiplies that by the number of conversions for total revenue.

Variable- this one requires Javascript knowledge. And I quote “write a Javascript function to return the transaction amount then call it from the tracking code generated for your webpage.”

Cost to Track- Again, you need to complete this for it to work- add specific costs (like shipping or tax) to the tracking code or as Javascript functions.

Conversion Period- is a set number of days you can choose from the drop down for the sales cycle.

Once everything has been selected/setup, save, generate code by picking a step (example: conversion step code to paste into the receipt page). And yes, you need to select each step, generate the code and go paste onto the appropriate page on your website.

An ACCOUNT can have up to 6 goals.

Adding Custom Report Dimensions

“Custom report dimensions allow you to track the performance of ad campaigns served through third party services.” As in, other search engines- but you have to append all destination URLs with dimension parameters.

Dimensions:

• Tactic (affiliate, email, ppc- a/k/a medium)
• Channel (Google, Facebook- a/k/a source)
• 3rd Party Campaign (whatever the name of the campaign is)
• 3rd Party Ad Group (the ad group name)
• 3rd Party Term (term that generated the visit)

• Enter a “key” to represent the dimension (i.e chnl for channel)
• Set value by entering the name of the value**the value and then append to the destination URL. So as in the screenshot, the Microsoft Media Network is classified as a channel by the abbreviation MMN and expressed as &chnl=MMN

• You can add up to 100 values per dimension
• Once a value is saved it CANNOT be deleted, only edited.

Campaign Analytics Reports

This section simply explains that there are several reports that will become available to you if you enable tracking in the reporting section:

Goal Reports, Traffic Sources Reports, Segments Reports and Tactics & Channels Reports.

Ready to go to Part 5?

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