Be Prepared

The new Sponsored Search is here…is your account ready?

“Be prepared.” It has been the Boy Scout motto for nearly a century, and for good reason. Being prepared, the Scouts say, can help you to adjust to changes and help turn challenges into successes.

As you probably know, we’ve begun the process of upgrading U.S. advertisers to the new Sponsored Search. Invitations to upgrade will continue to be sent in stages to U.S. advertisers over the remainder of the year and early next year.

Because we want our advertisers to be successful as we upgrade accounts over to the new Sponsored Search, we’ve created this handy little guide to help you be prepared for your upgrade. Please note that you will be provided with ample notice via email before your account is to be upgraded (so another important task is to make sure that your contact info is up-to-date—go to https://secure.overture.com/edit-profile.do and update it as necessary).

The first thing to note is that some of our account structure terminology that you’re used to will change after you upgrade:

Current: Categories
Categories have served as the organizational structure you assigned to groups of keywords that are similar in a particular way, for purposes of bid management or reporting.

New: Campaigns
“Campaigns” replace categories, and will consist of a combination of one or more ad groups that share the same budget, schedule and geo-targeting criteria, usually created to achieve a particular marketing goal.

There’s more to share on categories vs. campaigns; see below.

Current: Listings
“Listings” have been the combination of keyword, bid, title, description and URL.

New: Ads
You’ll create ads, consisting of a title, description and URL. You’ll be able to apply these ads to groups of keywords, instead of writing titles and descriptions for each individual keyword as you do today.

New: Ad Groups
“Ad Groups” are the combination of multiple ads (your creative) and keywords. You may set one bid for your entire ad group, or use individual keyword bids. There hasn’t been any equivalent for ad groups under the current system, but many advertisers will be familiar with the concept through other paid search providers.

Categories vs. Campaigns
When we upgrade your account, we’ll move your account categories into campaigns with the same names. So, it’s very important that you begin now to group your current listings that are related to each other into categories, to help ensure that your ads are better organized after we move your account to the new platform.

Here is an example: If you sold “SeeClearly” televisions, under the new Sponsored Search you would probably want to have a “SeeClearly” campaign that included ad groups for the models “SeeClearly X100,” “SeeClearly X200,” “SeeClearly HDX1000,” etc.

Using this example, we recommend that you set up a “SeeClearly” category now that would contain all of your SeeClearly listings.

Later this week, we’ll share our top recommendations for getting your account ready for your upgrade—some you should do before you make the switch and some for during the upgrade itself.

—The Team