Important Announcement on Business and the Coronavirus

Dear Clients,

Many of you are having business affected by Covid-19 or the coronavirus this month.

We wanted to let you know that if you ask us to pause your Google Ads account and stop Google Ads management services, we will process a credit memo to your account for the unused time for the month. You will receive a copy of the credit memo at the end of the month with your statement.

When you restart our services, we will apply that credit to your month’s management fee.

Should you have a greater impact and not restart services within three months, we will mail you a check for your credit.

We do encourage you to sign up to receive our blog post notices by email using Feedburner (on the home page of our blog on the top left where it says “get our articles by email”). This way when we have additional announcements you will receive them in your inbox.

In the meantime, stay safe and be healthy.

Sincerely,

Nancy McCord

 

How to Get Started Advertising on Bing to LinkedIn Users

Image of a team reviewing a proposal from McCord Web Services in a conference room.
Nancy McCord is a Microsoft Advertising Certified Professional.
Nancy McCord is a Microsoft Advertising Certified Professional.

Microsoft Advertising now allows you to target LinkedIn users, based on their profile settings, with pay per click ads on Bing.com.

For many Business to Business companies, being able to target decision makers is a potentially productive marketing strategy.

How do you get started?

Once you have set up your Microsoft Advertising or Bing Ads account you can select your campaign and then scroll to the section called targeting. It is typically below where you will set your locations to target.

Once you tick open the selector you will see targeting options for company, job function, and industry.  Microsoft Advertising will set a plus click bid of 15% which you can adjust manually up or down.

We have found that targeting by company can be highly valuable. You can add company names not URLs in the add field one by one manually. There is no bulk import option in the online ad platform.

Once a company is entered, Microsoft Advertising will show a drop down and you confirm that this is the firm you want to target. Just complete and repeat for each company name entry.

Important Note

Remember, this is totally different from LinkedIn advertising. The ads and targeting you are using in Microsoft Advertising are to show ads with a plus up bid for people with LinkedIn profiles that are using Bing.com for a search. They will only see your ads there.

Get Help with Your Microsoft Advertising Program Today

If you need more information about how you can use LinkedIn targeting for your Microsoft Advertising, just visit our services page on our website to learn more and to get started with our services.

 

How to Move Your Website to SSL

Be in the Know on Microsoft Advertising

Many website owners are getting approached by their hosts to move from http to https. What is important to know is that there is an easy way to do this and a hard way.

Here are my tips to easily move from http to https

Typically I will recommend that you buy your SSL certificate through your web host. Although it may be slightly more expensive, when you use your host’s provider your host is eager to help you set up your SSL cert correctly.

I paid $199 for my SSL certificate which is renewable each year through my web host. Once you have purchase the certificate, your host take over the installation on your server. For most clients this is all that needs to be done. Everything should work yet be under the green padlock and your site should start with https.

I do recommend that if you do move to SSL that you have your webmaster review your website files to assure that there are no hard coded in page links within your website referencing http. If there are, you will want them to change them to https.

Also if you are running WordPress in a directory on your site, you will want to update your logins and locations so that your blog and the blog access control panel are now all https.

Last of all do not forget to update the links in Google Ads. Change your site links and ad URLs to https to complete the project.

One tip, I typically recommend moving to https before you do a website redesign. There is nothing worse than having to troubleshoot server issues for https while you are troubleshooting a new site launch. Don’t do these updates at the same time.