Posted By Industrial Web Solutions Marketing Team on September 7, 2010

I learned of a very useful tool for keyword research from a recent ClickZ article by Sage Lewis. In his post The Best Key Phrase Research Tool You Don’t Use, Sage introduces us to the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Excel plug-in tool available from Microsoft AdCenter to account holders. You also must have Excel 2007 in order for the plug-in to work (you can download a 60-day Free trial of Excel here).

Microsoft’s own introduction to the tool states:

“It provides keyword expansion, research, pricing and KPI data, allowing you to maximize marketing ROI for your paid search and content ad campaigns. The Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool lets you:

• Quickly and easily build out lists of suggested keywords and develop informed keyword strategies based on actual Bing and MSN query data, including: relevance, volume, cost history, demographic and geographic.
• Leverage actual historic and forecasted monthly query and content data to optimize your keyword campaigns based on what potential customers are actually doing, and spend more on what works and less on what doesn’t.
• Tailor your bidding strategy based on pricing data for keyword-specific metrics such as clicks, impressions, position, click-through rate and cost per click.
• Gather pricing KPIs for specific businesses to determine the monetization potential of a vertical and how well it is performing.

Of course, the tool is designed to understand how you can improve your performance in Bing, particularly if you are an advertiser participating in Bing’s search engine marketing program. One of the greatest benefits of this search tool is the actionable intelligence it provides to “help you forecast the expected cost and performance of your search and content campaigns,” invaluable for setting realistic budgets suitable to your particular business category and vertical.

 Information about Installing and Opening Microsoft Advertising Intelligence is available here.

Categories: business development, content targeting, industrial marketing, industrial search engines, search, search engine marketing, search network, seo
Tags: bing, keyword research tool, Microsoft AdCenter, search marketing, sem, seo