Ask.com is launching an updated version of the paid search ad system they purchased from LookSmart and implemented one year ago. Some nice features, but overall - a yawner in terms of improving ad performance. This system launches on Monday, October 2nd and includes the following “put you in control” features:
1) Daily budgeting. Used to be a monthly budget with daily averages, now it will be a hard daily budget.
2) More control over re-fill amounts. The minimum re-fill amount (charge against your credit card) is 3 days of minimum spend.
3) No minimum spends on Ask.com.
4) Hourly billable data. Providing updated cost data throughout the day. Much better than the 1-3 day delay we’re seeing now in our reports.
5) Change in campaign structure from listings to ads and targeting. Now the structure is built around: Account > Categories > Advertisement > Keyword. This will help be more consistent with other engines so that you have lots of keywords against one ad like Google, MSN and soon Yahoo!
6) Negative matching at advertisement level. Makes campaign management easier.
7) Bulk uploads via CSV/Excel - 65,000 rows for current version of Excel, but up to 1,000,000 with new version of Excel Vista or Live or whatever it’s called.
8) No delay in bulk upload processing so you keep working while processed behind the scene.
9) Simplified campaign state. On/Off instead of the 10 or so states they have in Ask 2.0.

These improvements are really aimed at people like us who work in the interface a lot, but won’t really help in terms of targeting, testing or true end user optimization. Hopefully the commercials they are running improves the quality and quantity of their search traffic.