MSN announced the launch of a new ad preview tool for Bing.com. Instead of typing in your keywords directly into Bing, you can now use the ad preview tool to make sure your ads are showing without affecting the real search results.
Typically, I will get clients that like to type in their keywords into Google, Yahoo and MSN almost every day just to see how their ad looks in the SERPS. Unfortunately, this can cause problems for your account. If you type in a keyword and variations of that keyword too many times, but you’re not clicking on any ads, the search engines will serve up different ads and sometimes not showing your ad at all. They do this because they’re assuming since you haven’t clicked on any ads that what they’re displaying for you aren’t relevant, so they begin to display other ads in hopes that you’ll click on one of those. This typically will cause much confusion on the clients end since their ad doesn’t come up in the SERPS anymore and they want to know why.
Another thing that can happen is if you’re typing in keywords daily just to check your ads, this can drive up your impressions and can lower your click-through rates. A lower click-through rate typically means a lower Quality Score which can drive up your costs.
Of course, Google has the same ad preview tool and what’s nice about that tool is you can provide a link to the tool to your clients so they can check on their ads all day long if they’d like without affecting your click-through rates.
To access the ad preview tool within the MSN interface click on any campaign, and in the upper right hand corner there will be a link for the ‘ad preview tool’.
Once you click on that link, you’ll get to a page that has a large empty white box and a field where you can enter your keyword.
Once you enter your keyword and hit the ‘preview ads’ button your results will be shown as if they would be in bing.com.
The Bing preview tool simply shows you where your position is and what the ad looks like within Bing. This way, you don’t have to type in your keyword in the directly into Bing to get the same information which can cause your click-through rates to decrease.
