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One of the key factors in business success is leverage. Microsoft Advertising Intelligence allows you to leverage true history and forecast data. This means your keyword efforts are based on actual customer activity. You get key performance indicators (KPI) to track performance.

The full name of this tool is Microsoft Advertising Intelligence. It is designed as a research and optimization tool that works with Microsoft Office Excel 2007, providing keyword expansion, pricing, KPI data and research. What this means for the business person is that you can make the most of your marketing investment. You’ll need to uninstall the earlier versions of adCenter Add-in for Excel. Of course, you should have Microsoft Office Excel 2007 installed. Be sure Excel is closed when you go through the Ad Intelligence install process.

With Ad Intelligence you can work with lists of suggested keywords, and develop your strategy for keywords using MSN and Bing query information. The details include volume, relevance, demographic and geographic tracking as well as cost history. This data helps you fine tune your bid strategy because you use actual pricing information and data that is specific to keywords. You get information on clicks, impressions, cost-per-click and position.

As product information for Ad Intelligence states, “Search activity reflects real time consumer behavior which helps determine the best planning approach for your online and offline campaigns. This ensures you are talking to your consumers with the right message, at the right time in the right place, to build truly integrated campaigns.”

Planning for Success

It’s tempting to get into the online marketing business because it seems the “hot” thing to do. But if you want to increase the chances of success you should devote some time to planning first. Microsoft Advertising Intelligence is designed to assist you in that planning process. For example, your working campaigns will be constructed on reliable information, data that allows you to make good decisions.

Ad Intelligence means using keyword search tools built into the Excel program as well as developing keyword lists based on actual behavior and trends. Data you can use includes relevant rankings that will help you understand how this will add value to the effort. You will be able to use your business budget on campaigns that actually work!

Features that will help your efforts succeed include a keyword wizard that lets you pull keywords out of an Excel list or from a specific URL. You can then expand your keyword list based on bidding association, similarity of categories or keyword phrases that contain the single keyword. You can move a detailed report containing estimated search volume, ad position, click-through, click cost for a specific range of dates etc.

Search buzz focuses on top-category keywords, with almost two dozen core categories available. There are dozens upon dozens of subcategories. If you are familiar with the usefulness of “spiky” numbers you’ll find that Ad Intelligence uses the above-mentioned categories but focuses on spiky keywords. Features include spike start and end dates as well as spiky index. One of the key features allows you to set your information to all verticals so you can uncover the leading spiky keywords or top search queries.

There’s More!

Microsoft Advertising Intelligence offers keyword-focused tools such as extraction that is based on input URL. You will be able to set the maximum number of keywords up to 100. It even allows you to establish a minimum relevancy so you can tailor your confidence level. If you are not sure of the efficiency of a certain keyword the tool has keyword suggestion to help you. Suggestions are based on such details as long-tail keywords containing the core keyword and on advertiser behavior.

Other features include:

• Keyword categorization that helps you organize keywords
• Data on monthly traffic including forecasts for up to three months.
• Geographic details
• Demographic details
• Monetization so you can study ad clicks, click-through rate and more

One of the nice tools available in Ad Intelligence is keyword normalization. This means that the software will find and flag duplicates in an advertising group. The feature might select a keyword if it has extraneous characters or if capitalization is a bit different. This process takes place automatically and will save the use a lot of time. You don’t have to manually manage variations of the same keyword.

Extraneous characters might be quotation marks, hyphens, asterisks, parentheses, brackets and many other common symbols. Extraneous words such as “a” and “an” may trigger normalization as well.

The advertiser can remove duplicates or remove the original. With the automatic task in Ad Intelligence and some careful editing by the advertiser this feature will mean more search queries match chosen keywords. Advertising return should be increased with this fine-tuning process.

This group of tools is designed to help advertisers improve their online advertising results through accurate modeling. Business owners will be able to more correctly predict intent of the user because of the specific data based on keyword and phrase selection. This can be an awesome tool in the online commercial world. Why? Because the way people search is determined by geography, demographics, age, gender and other factors.

Keyword and search characteristics provide a nice overview of the target audience. An advertiser use Ad Intelligence is able to learn more about a user’s intent and discover a doorway into a social network that this user is part of.