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adCenter’s Mantra: ROI on Time Spent, Interview With Rathna Sharad

3/27/2012 by Leave a Comment

photo of Rathna Sharad

Key Points from Interview with Rathna Sharad

The first person I met with during my week at Microsoft in January was Rathna Sharad. This was a great start because she set the tone for all of the interviews I did. In the discussion below you will see key insights into the thinking behind the overall adCenter strategy. Here are some of the other key points from the interview:

  1. “The Web UI is good for a couple thousand keywords, maybe even up to ten thousand keywords in an account.”
  2. “If you have tens of thousands of keywords, the adCenter Desktop Tool works very well.”
  3. “Anyone that has hundreds of thousands of keywords, or more, is a great candidate for the API.”
  4. adCenter strices to make all the same features available in the Web UI, the desktop tool, and via tha API.
  5. adCenter keeps old version of the API alive for 6 to 9 months to allow people using it time to update their tools, but they do need to make the switchover.
  6. Rathna indicates that there are no known latency issues with the API, but they recently did a desktop tool release to make that more efficient with very large campaigns.
  7. Filtering functionality was added to the Web UI in late 2011. You can filter on any of the columns in the reports.
  8. The adCenter team is working on features to make recommendations to advertisers based on their goals.
  9. “Our marketplace is different; our consumers are different, the way they interact within the ecosystem is different.”
  10. “What it (Microsoft Advertising Intelligence or MAI) does at a high level is really provide insights into the monetization aspect, which is adCenter, as well as the forecasting aspect which is based on historical performance. For example, here is what we think you should be bidding for mainline, sidebar, first page placement, those types of recommendations.”
  11. One of the key capabilities in MAI is the keyword estimation capability, which shows traffic you can expect.
  12. adCenter provides information on share of voice (aka impression share), including why it is your share is currently being limited.
  13. The two major points of focus for adCenter are Return on Time Spent and industry standardization (parity with Adwords) to make it easier for advertisers to spend incremental ad budgets with adCenter.

Full Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Rathna Sharad: My role currently is director of product management for demand. Essentially that I oversee the web UI, API, adCenter Desktop and the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool. I’ve been with Microsoft for almost six years now, and I’ve been working on search for that duration. The first two and a half years I was on the engineering side, so actually I’ve been through a lot of the products.

The latter half of the six years I’ve been on the product management team. Ultimately, I play a role in redefining our product strategy and the roadmap for advertisers. Prior to Microsoft I worked on transportation and supply chain solutions for UPS and freight forwarding companies.

The way I have my team organized is around the different areas that advertisers interact with. One of the product managers on my team is responsible for campaign management and the Web UI. We also have product managers that look after the adCenter Desktop tool as well as the Microsoft advertising intelligence tool which is basically around forecasting and prediction in terms of traffic and volumes, and also been in traffic estimation for specific keywords.

I also have people that take care of billing, and customer management, and agency management, capabilities within the platform. And, finally we have reporting, so essentially all of the recommendation engine as well as the reports generation if you will through the tools.

Eric Enge: Can you tell me a little bit about why people would choose the Web UI or the adCenter Desktop tool or the API?

Rathna Sharad: One factor is the size of their campaigns. The Web UI is good for a couple thousand keywords, maybe even up to ten thousand keywords in an account. Anything more than that, it gets a little tricky to navigate through it and find what you are looking for in a short amount of time.

adCenter Web UI

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Author Authority and Social Media with Bing’s Paul Yiu

3/12/2012 by 3 Comments

photo of Paul Yiu

Key Points from Interview with Paul Yiu

Tons of discussion in here about how social media can impact search results. While the author authority discussion is near the end I am going to highlight it first here (Twitter was the specific social network discussed), because there is a LOT of confirmation of how author authority works:

  1. Bing does look at the number of followers you have.
  2. They also look at the number of people you follow. If you follow 200 people and 8,000 follow you this might indicate more authority than if you follow 9,000 people and 8,000 follow you.
  3. “We can actually analyze the follow graph and tell if you are trying to game the system.”
  4. Relevance of the followers is used as a signal: “who you are connected to says something about you. You don’t want to get into the wrong crowd; It’s not good if you hang out with the bad group at the high school.”
  5. The relevance of who you follow also matters.
  6. You don’t hurt your Twitter stream by talking about irrelevant stuff. What matters more is what happens to your relevant stuff.
  7. Retweeting patterns are tracked and used as a signal – especially for your relevant tweets.
  8. The relevance of the re-tweeters matters too.
  9. There are many iterations if signals that oculd be tracked, but as you get deeper and deeper into it the strength of the signal diminishes, so a limited number of factors (such as those above) are considered.

Here are some of the other key points from the interview:

  1. (re: social media): “The behind the scenes signals are pretty useful for us, as search engines always need to find fresh content, and it’s always hard to rank fresh content.”
  2. “We are trying to merge a little bit of the search and browsing intent into one, and have your friends help you navigate the web a little bit better. In a way we are bringing the office water cooler to the search engine.” (the emphasis is mine).
  3. (regarding using “wisdom of the crowd” to move content higher in the results): “… people tend to like gossipy things, such as who got pregnant or was in a scandal, or something like that, so it tends to work in those cases, but not so much in the case of navigational searches …”
  4. “If the content doesn’t earn its spot its placement gets modified” (confirming again that Bing uses CTR which was done for the first time in this interview with Duane Forrester.
  5. As of February 22, 2012 users could associate articles of interest with people they know (the “subject” person). The subject can then use Facebook to decide if they want that article associated with them or not. If they let it be associated that article will now be highlighted in the search results for friends of the subject.
  6. Social media can provide some useful enhancements to search, but currently is not in danger of reshaping the structure of search (my paraphrase of a conversation below).
  7. Bing currently does not analyze Facebook updates to collect information that could be used to personalize search results. For one thing, there are serious privacy concerns with this.
  8. “The typical network on Twitter has characteristics that are hard for people to emulate artificially. These (artifical networks) are unnatural, and when we see networks like this you can tell these people are trying to sell teeth whitening or whatever.”
  9. “… when you say stuff where people tend to re-tweet you it behaves bit like a link.”
  10. The level of effort to make a social media action affects the signal strength. For example, a Like is very little effort, and a Share requires a bit more effort.

Full Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you start off with an overview of Bing and social to date?

Paul Yiu: Over two years ago we went down this path of integrating Twitter into search. Much of what we’ve done with Twitter is actually really interesting even though you may not visibly see everything. Here is what the UI looks like.

Twitter shown in the Bing UI

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