Christi Olson (@ChristiJOlson), is the head of Evangelism for Search and Advertising at Microsoft. She speaks around the world and is super smart and an amazing communicator. She has been in the search space since 2005, she has really done it all from in-house, agency and now working for a search engine doing both paid and organic search. She does miss the in-house SEM side of things but loves her current job. She first worked at Microsoft, then left and did other things and then came back to Microsoft later.
She was at Microsoft before it was called Bing; it was called Live, Live Search, windows Live Search, Windows Search, etc. And she was also there for the Bing launch. But she was also at Microsoft pre and post adCenter launch - now it is Microsoft Advertising. The Bing named worked, it stuck, but for advertising they went with Microsoft Advertising, not Bing Ads.
Audience targeting is a topic she loves, not because it sounds creepy but because how you can really connect with your segments. It is getting people to think about their segments, adjusting their ads, bids and landing pages for those segments. We got off on a few tangents talking about Facebook and even the Kardashians and then moved on.
You can import your Google Ads data into Microsoft Advertising. It essentially lets you sync from Google Ads to Microsoft Advertising. There are some things you should do like updating your tracking codes and some other things. It is all about making your jobs easier when managing your ad campaigns. You can set the sync to automate it going forward. This also works using Google Search Console to Bing Webmaster Tools, which launched at SMX West in February.
Microsoft retail and digital commerce strategy is the final topic we talked about. Microsoft knows the retail vertical really well and helps smaller e-commerce companies compete against Amazon. PromoteIQ is the platform, so check it out.
Christi Olson spends about 25% of her time traveling, she said. And she often brings her kids with her on these business trips. Obviously not at this moment, but hopefully soon.
You can follow Christi Olson at @ChristiJOlson.
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Forum discussion at YouTube.
