The sponsored lunch today at Search Insider Summit comes from Microsoft adCenter which included a demo of their new Keyword Services Platform and add-in to Excel 2007.
Stacy Harris:
Feedback from marketers is that traffic is good, but they want more of it. Marketers also want AdCenter to be easier to use.
Natala Menezes is up next and promptly announces Stacy was engaged last night!
Key points for current and future development of adCenter: Quality, Transparency and Simplicity.
What does this mean to keyword research, optimization and analysis? Access to real data, not just graphs including demographic and geographic information. It also means easy to use tools including keyword libraries and an adCenter add-in for Excel 2007 which focuses Keyword research, forecasting and monetization data.
Next up is Zhaohui Tang.
Keyword research is the most important aspect of any search optimization or analytics effort affecting: expansion, monetization, commercial intention, seasonality, synonyms, categories, translation, demographics and others.
Microsoft adCenter Keyword Services Platform: Algorithms to extrapolate new terms from a set and categorical relationships. Server platform offering keyword related services for adCenter but also for 3rd party developers to create new advertising applications.
Demo of KSP. I was sitting at a very bad angle as you can see, so I didn’t get any good photos. While the tool will not be released until early 2008, hopefully the adCenter team can give me access soon to do my own demo and review. Hint hint. 🙂
The demo shows Excel 2007 with numerous tabs on top showing a variety of keyword applications that go to the web and bring back the data directly into excel. Keyword extraction, suggestion, search buzz, monthly traffic, keyword categorization, geographic info, demographic info, monetization info (clicks, impressions, avg positions, CTR, CPC). There are also advanced algorithm settings.
The app is cool enough that there are whistles from the audience after the search volume tool is run resulting in big smiles from Stacy and Natala:
Audience: Will there be backward compatibility for Excel 2003?
Natala: Microsoft is working on a web version and the MSFT engineer fellow said there will be a backward compatible version for Excel 2003
Audience: (Gord Hotchkiss) are all the features you showed only for your “head” phrases? How many terms will be returned?
Engineer: Only keywords where at least 10 queries per month. There is also a “generous” quota of query volume.
Natala: It’s also a live database being added to and will grow as time goes on.
Audience: How is the confidence score determined?
Engineer: Long answer, but basically algorithms that give an indication of probability.
I am looking forward to this tool/app/whatever you call it. It’s odd, though, that they are building it in to Excel 2007, no? And a web-version to come later?
A sign of future Office-to-web cross usage, I guess. But I would prefer just a web version to start. Let me download into a .csv (so I can be sure to have a save-able file before Excel crashes.)
Looking forward to trying it.
That’s great feedback Tim. Actually, they already have a web version, but it’s not out yet. I think the focus is on the Excel 2007 version. Seeing it in action is pretty cool because it sucks the data/search results from keyword analytics right into Excel. Then you can drill down within excel also.
Thanks for the great write up lee! The engineer was Zhaohui Tang! If people are interested in the tool, they can register to get notified of it’s availability here:
@Natala
I registered immediately after PubCon, when will the release be?
Is this good, or bad? The easier it is to get a huge keyword list, the more competition you’ll get, right?
Hi,
Very interesting presentation of this technology, but I am contacting you regarding a different wrinkle on ksp. We (ksp.com) are starting to receive more and more Email messages regarding Keyword Services Platform.
Thought I would let you know.
Thanks,
Jerry
Jerry Cassidy
781-641-5151