I actually did transfer one of our account and it is pretty smooth. Here is how it works. First you have the option to transfer to a current MSN account or to create a new one. Then all you have to do is to initiate the transfer by entering your Adcenter login info. The transfer will take less than a minute. Once it’s done, they offer you to download a spreadsheet of elements that were not compatible or to fix them right away with their wizard. Just use the wizard as you all you will mostly have to is reducing the length of a couple ads. And you’re all set!

Also, in case you are wondering, transferring your account doesn’t mean they will delete the data of your Overture Pay-per-click account right away. You will still be able to look at your historical data in your Overture account if you need.

Should you initiate the transition to MSN right away or should you wait until it becomes mandatory? Well, it’s up to you but I would suggest to do it  now as it will allow you to experiment with MSN’s pay per click management and be ahead of  everybody when the transition will be completed.

Not only can potential customers now see your rating but, if they click it, they will get redirected on a Google products page featuring customer reviews. This new feature should increase considerably conversions for websites with good ratings and, if you are already using Adwords pay-per-click but not Google Products yet, this should give you an additional incentive to use this service.

The 2 advertising platforms that are currently on the rise are Facebook and LinkedIn. Since they are pretty new, they are not saturated with advertisers yet, which might give you the first mover advantage, depending on your industry and niche. In addition, since they aren’t very competitive yet, the advertising costs are so far pretty low, thus affordable to everybody.

Which one should you choose? Well, it mostly depends on your target market.

Facebook, as you may already know, is now a leading online presence, with huge traffic, but it is mostly populated with the 20 to 40 year old crowd. One of the big advantage of their platform is that you can target your audience very precisely, whether it’s in terms of demographics, personal tastes, etc …

On the other hand, LinkedIn focuses on professionals, which will allow you to reach a wealthier and more educated audience. This is, as  a result, a great marketplace for higher-end products.

As you can see, Facebook and LinkedIn cater to different markets, allowing to reach a wide spectrum of potential buyers, thus providing a cost-effective alternative to the saturated Adwords and Overture platforms.

The way Adwords works is, you bid on certain keywords related to your website or business.  You say, “I am willing to pay this much money every time someone clicks on my ad”.  That amount varies dramatically based on your market and competition. It can be as little as 1 cent, or as much as 40 dollars or more.  Then, when someone searches for any of the keywords you have bid on, Google does a mini auction, determining who’s ad will show in what position.  The main things they look at when they do this auction is the keyword’s relevance to your website, the quality of your website itself, the quality and performance of your ad, and of course, your bid price.  Once the auction is completed, Google then assigns the different ads to the different positions and displays them.  Here’s the important thing though, you don’t pay what you bid – you pay based on the people below you’s bid.  Because of these other factors, like the quality of your website, past performance and keyword relevance, you can actually be paying much less than the people below you and show up higher than them!

Not all PPC programs work this way, but many of the most popular ones do.  There are many good reasons to not only use Google’s adwords, but use the other programs as well.  You can often get better traffic for less from these other programs.  But as far as sheer quantity, Adwords is the best.

I find myself asking the same AdWords questions to every potential client.  In the hopes of improving everyone’s campaigns, I will list my general questions here, along with the typical answers I receive.

1.  Are you happy with your results?  Is your campaign profitable?

Normal Answer:  “Not really – no.” I haven’t spoken to a person yet that was happy with their results, although I have seen profitable yet wasteful ones. I have seen one client throwing away thousands of dollars a week.  That account had so many things wrong that I just told them to turn their account off.

2.  Who set up your AdWords account?

Normal Answer:  “I/We did.  Why?”

If the client set it up themselves, that tells me that there are most likely penalties or mistakes that need to be fixed.  It also gives me an idea of their skill level and what the rest of the answers to my questionnaire would be.

3.  What is your quality score?

Normal Answer:  “What is ‘quality score’?”

(This is a number from 1 to 10 that measures the “quality” of a given ad)

Most clients don’t know where this information is since Google hides this information from view.

If the quality score is below 7/10,  you are incurring penalties and don’t even realize it (see chart)

4.  Where are you sending people that click on your ads?

Normal Answer:  “Our home page”. The correct answer, of course, is a dedicated landing page for the specific keyword group.

If you sell computer supplies, you may have a keyword group called “keyboards”.  You would then want to send someone to the web page:  http://www.mydomain/keyboard which shows them all your keyboards, NOT to your home which makes them take an additional step to find what they need.

5.  What is your CTR (Click-Through-Rate)?

Normal Answer: “Not good – less than 1%”. By itself, this statistic doesn’t mean much.  Usually, the higher the CTR, or the higher the number of users click your ad vs. just look at it, the better your Quality Score, the cheaper your ad cost, and more profitable your campaign.

6. What is your conversion rate?

Normal Answer: “What is conversion rate?” (This is the ratio that measures the number of people that complete a purchase or signup to a newsletter vs. the amount of people that just click your ad and do nothing.)  Since understanding conversion rate is paramount to having a successful keyword campaign, this is a bad sign.

Once you have enough conversions, you can start to weed out keywords that under-perform, and find more that do.

7.  What are you setting as your “goal” to base your conversion on?

Normal Answer:  “When they buy our product.” This is a legitimate solution, however, we additionally always try to capture the “lead” goal so that we can capture the users identity so that we can email them later if they don’t complete the purchase.

8.  How many ads do you have running for each ad group?

Normal Answer:  “One.” You should always be running at least 3 ads for a given ad group.  At any given time, you can throw out the worst performing one and replace it with one you hope will beat the other two.

9.  What is your budget?

There is no correct answer to this question.  This is just to flesh out whether they are turning their account on or off repeatably (a big no-no), or hitting their maximum limit for the day at 2 AM.

10.  Are you using negative keywords?

Normal Answer: “Huh?”  Negative keywords allow you to NOT bid on certain words that show up in a phrase.  A common problem are song or band names.  You may want to bid on the keyword “cocaine” as in “cocaine abuse”, but you don’t want “cocaine clapton mp3″.

A major part of optimizing a campaign is finding and using negative keywords to limit any wasted funds.