A variety of analytics tools made available by Microsoft will help its adCenter customers optimize their campaigns for greater effectiveness.
Another option in Microsoft’s entry into self service contextual advertising has become available. MediaPost noted the arrival of AdLab from Microsoft.
AdLab focuses on delivering more useful information on paid search, contextual advertising, behavioral targeting, and emerging markets. Presently, demos of several tools may be found on the AdLab website.
Under Paid Search, users can see the effect of “search funnels,” sequences of keywords people tend to enter when conducting searches. Users can pick incoming or outgoing funnels, which show the queries made before or after a particular keyword has been searched.
The Keyword Mutation Detection tool displays common misspellings of words based on a given keyword. And the Context-Based Acronym Resolution tool can predict the most likely context for a given query that contains an acronym or abbreviation.
Contextual Advertising demos of Content and Keyword Categorization allow the user to see how websites or keywords could be categorized. The tool ranks the confidence that a keyword relates to a particular category.
Behavior Targeting tools can predict a user’s age, gender, and other demographic information based on their online behavior, based on the search queries and page views they do and see. Another tool can attempt to divine the visitor’s Online Commercial Intention, to determine if they are visiting to make a purchase or just to find information.
In Emerging Markets, the Local Ads on PC tool can list relevant ads for a given location based on the visitor’s IP address, and deliver local content to them.
The article noted that the site will start with data on about 10,000 keywords. Over time, that should grow to 10 million keywords available to the site tools on AdLab.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
