• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 4, 2011

Microsoft has introduced a feature that allows marketers to bring the Google AdWords campaign data directly into adCenter. The feature, found in version 8.1 of the adCenter desktop app, begins with clicking the Import button and making a selection from the menu. Importing data requires an AdWords user name, password and customer identification number.

"Core atomic differences" still exist between adCenter and AdWords, admits Brian Utter, senior director of global product management for the Microsoft Advertising Search Business. The granular structure of the campaign data differs, but going through the import wizard provides detailed instructions on how to solve each discrepancy.

Marketers will find one difference in the character count for paid-search ad copy. Google AdWords supports two lines of text, 35 characters each, and one character for the carriage return in text ads. In total, marketers get 71 characters. and Microsoft adCenter supports 70 characters. The discrepancy requires marketers to tweak the process when importing ad text from Google AdWords to Microsoft adCenter. There are others.

Utter said Microsoft will continue to change the process more toward an industry standard. That "industry standard," however, does not really exist. He points to Google's processes as the unofficial industry standard because the search engine owns the majority of the market share. By default, Google's processes have become the industry standard.

Tweaking adCenter processes will enable the free flow of data for advertising campaigns. The goal is to make adCenter easier to use, and more streamlined. "I don't want to have to teach them how to use another system just to get them to participate in our own," Utter said. "We're also looking for feedback on what works and what doesn't."

Aside from changes in adCenter, Microsoft said it's expanding Crawl Detail information for Bing. This means the ending will show all inbound links to a given URL, regardless of the heading. Anything listed under the 300, 400 and 500 codes by URL will display inbound links to the URL as well as any URLs listed under the Robots.txt and Malware headings, explains Duane Forrester, senior product manager, Webmaster Outreach at Bing. Companies are no longer limited to just seeing inbound links that point only to pages returning a 400 header response code.

Evidently that's a key update. Others include improving email alerts, URL normalization suggestions, deep data in Index Explorer, DNS verification, and adCenter data integration.