by Kimberly Kohatsu

CallFire is proud to sponsor Twiistup, LA’s biggest technology event. Twiistup 8 will take place February 9 and 10 at the Skirball Cultural Center. In between all the great speakers and startup presentations Twiistup has to offer, CallFire is holding a scavenger hunt, where one lucky participant will win an Xbox Kinect.

The scavenger hunt is a creative way for participants to experience some of the CallFire products. The first clue is going to be delivered via SMS, and the third clue was built using a CallFire Inbound IVR. (The second and fourth clues are going to be surprises, we can’t give everything away)

The IVR asks a series of multiple choice questions, much like a business might do if it were creating a phone tree. Each question has its own KeyPress menu, which will tell you if your answer was right and direct you to move on, or tell you your answer is wrong and to try again. I recorded each of the clues over the phone using CallFire’s voice recording utility. Then I designed the phone tree using the drag-and-drop commands on CallFire’s IVR Designer. When I was done, I sent a test call to myself to see if the IVR was functioning correctly. I had to do it a couple times before I got the hang of it, so here are a few tips I learned along the way:

• In order to stay organized, make sure you name all your sound files something meaningful. CallFire will give your file a default name, so before you do anything, rename these files. I used names like “Q1″ and “A1″ for question and answers, as well as “Incorrect” and “Welcome” for the appropriate messages.
• Also give your tags and menus meaningful names. My IVR was fairly complicated, so this helped me keep everything straight. The CallFire system will default to only the name of the tag, meaning it will name a play tag “play” and a goto tag “goto.” I would edit these names further so that I could easily see I was dealing with the “Q3 menu” or that for a certain keypress I was configuring “Q2 Press1 Incorrect.” The more indents and conditions you have, the easier it is to get confused. By naming each of my menus and tags the same way, I was able to keep myself on track.



• Keep your sound files simple, with only one element in each. In my first attempt to build this IVR, I put the answer to Question 1 in the same sound file as the reading of the next question, Question 2. This made it more difficult to offer people the option to repeat Question 2 without having to hear the answer to Question 1 again. So I re-recorded myself and kept these two elements separate, and that made the IVR design cleaner and easier to manage. So say, for instance, you’re building a phone tree for an office. Don’t put your greeting and your office hours in the same sound file. This way, if someone wants to hear your office hours again, they don’t also have to listen to your greeting again, too.
• If none of this made any sense whatsoever, attend a CallFire webinar on Wednesdays at 11AM PST. Our trained solutions staff will decode everything I just conveyed, and help you apply it to your own uses.

Hope to see some of you at Twiistup! If you haven’t already gotten your tickets, buy them here. Remember, alongside all the other great CallFire giveaways, one lucky scavenger is going to walk away with a Kinect

by Natalia Klishina

Due to all the interest in my earlier post about transferring campaigns from Google AdWords into Microsoft AdCenter (Bing), I decided to add on some additional information I’ve learned since then, and to put it all in video form.

Share of US Online Search

Google – 67.6%
Microsoft – 14.1%
Yahoo! – 13.9%
Ask.com – 3.8%
AOL – 0.7%
Conclusion from this: you can be paying a lot less for Bing, so make sure to change your maximum bids when you transfer campaigns (we use about a quarter of our Google bids, and see a quarter of the CPC).

Similarities & Differences

• Same bidding system: pay $0.01 more than the next-highest bidder, all other factors equal.
• AdCenter is PRE-PAY only. AdWords will send you invoices.
• AdWords lets you rotate or optimize ads. AdCenter will automatically optimize by CTR.
• AdCenter does not currently support image or video ads.

Match Types

Note: AdCenter does NOT have modified broad match, which you will have to compensate for. AdCenter also only has negative PHRASE match (no negative exact match).

AdCenter also has keyword normalization, so it will automatically ignore common conjunctions and prepositions (a, about, an, at, by, for, how, in, is, of, on, or, the, to, what, with). That means that if you have a phrase like “what is,” both of those words are going to be thrown out because they are noise words.

Ad Structure

AdWords: Line 1 is a maximum of 35 characters; Line 2 is a maximum of 35 characters.
AdCenter: Ad text is a maximum of 70 characters.
Looks the same, but isn’t. AdCenter inserts a line break in the most appropriate place automatically; you choose where the line break is in AdWords.

How to Transfer Your Campaigns

Watch the video.

Important Factors to Keep Track Of

1. Make sure your campaign settings transfer correctly (usually the “devices” is what never transfers right).
2. Keep track of your negatives! (AdCenter sometimes calls this “exclusions.”)
• “Account negatives,” which are new to AdWords, will not transfer because AdCenter only has campaign negatives and lower, so you will need to transfer these manually.
• Since AdCenter doesn’t have exact negatives, make sure you find everything that used to be an exact negative and review whether it will work as a phrase negative. Example: you might have an exact negative like -[phone] in AdWords because it’s too nonspecific for you to want to capture people searching for just “phone.” Once it transfers as the phrase negative “phone,” though, it means anyone searching for a phrase with the word “phone” in it will not see your ad.
• Look through all your negative keywords searching for noise words and get rid of them (or the entire phrases). For example, if you had [what is call tracking] as an exact negative phrase, it becomes “what is call tracking.” Both “what” and “is” are ignored as noise words, meaning you essentially have the negative keyword “call tracking” for the keyword “call tracking.” Don’t let it happen to you!
3. Keep track of your modified broach match keywords. They will transfer with the “+,” but AdCenter will not recognize what that means. You’ll need to manually replace those with either broach match or phrase match.
4. Scroll through all your ads and make sure they look the same visually. Sometimes you will also have to fix length, because the strange break will put you over the length limit.

Also…

DON’T use a mac!

DO download AdCenter Desktop — the AdCenter equivalent of AdWords Editor.

Good luck!

by Kimberly Kohatsu

We at CallFire often struggle with how to describe what it is that we do. And, as someone fairly new to the company, this is the first question I want a real answer to. What is it? How does it work? Why is it good?

One of the difficulties in describing CallFire is that it offers such a broad array of functions. Businesses use CallFire in completely different ways. Our company tends to describe our suite of products as “cloud telephony,” but that doesn’t seem to clarify much. The best way I’ve been able to describe CallFire is it helps manage big calling tasks. These tasks might be calling a long list of people, or handling a large amount of calls coming in, and routing those calls to the right place. Anything with a phone that might seem daunting, CallFire makes manageable. Are we clearer yet?

Not really. I’m not entirely satisfied with that answer. It seems incomplete—CallFire doesn’t just help businesses manage, it helps businesses grow. It’s a business tool and a marketing tool. For instance, text marketing is becoming a bigger deal. We help businesses do that. We even help businesses retain their customers and build loyalty by enabling them to send automated appointment reminders, or set up customer satisfaction surveys. So now, it’s not really about making businesses more manageable, it’s about making them smarter.

Great. What’s a nice, concise way to convey all that? “CallFire: a really smart way to manage your phone operations that will potentially also help you serve your customers better and get new ones so that you can make more money.” Fit that on a business card, please. Thanks.

I’m still at a loss. So I’m trying out this whole crowdsourcing thing. I’m going to describe some of the ways CallFire is being used, and you guys out there in Internetland tell me how best to encapsulate it.

CallFire in a (Very Large) Nutshell

• Our Cloud Call Center enables businesses to call a lot more people in a lot less time. For instance, political organizations use CallFire for volunteer phone banking, and insurance agents use CallFire to get in touch with their leads. CallFire saves them the hassle of dialing numbers by hand. You simply upload a list (an Excel file or CSV) and the CallFire system dials them for you. It’s even intelligent enough to skip bad phone numbers and busy signals, so it’s just people talking to people. CallFire also has a feature called SmartDrop, where if the agent hears voicemail pick up, they can press a button and leave a pre-recorded message—no waiting for the beep. CallFire also provides call data such as the length and time of each call, and can record each call for quality assurance monitoring.

See, that was a 140-word paragraph to describe one product. There are four more! Woe is me. Alas. Moving on…

• Hosted IVR is our second product. IVR is complicated because we offer both inbound and outbound IVR, and, of course, they do different things. First off, IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response. It’s better described as a virtual receptionist or a phone tree. You know when you call a business, and you hear, ‘press 1 for this and press 2 for that?’ That’s an inbound phone tree. But of course, that begs the question, what’s an outbound phone tree? An outbound phone tree works the opposite way. The business calls you, and then gives you phone menu choices. So a business might use an IVR to conduct a satisfaction survey. Example: “Would you recommend us to your friends? Press 1 for yes, 2 for maybe, 3 for no.” Automated phone polls can also collect RSVPs for an event, ask about new product offerings, or get other feedback.

Um… any ideas for that big umbrella phrase to encapsulate all this yet? All right then. Here’s the next product.

• Call Tracking is generally used in marketing campaigns. Let’s say you’re a real estate agent. You get one of those bus benches with your picture on it, and you put an ad in the local paper. With call tracking, if you put one phone number on the bench and a different number in the paper, you can gauge how many people are calling as a result of the bench versus the print ad. Is either one worth the cost? Call Tracking will help you know.

Pretty clear, right? Maybe? Hopefully? No? Next…

• Voice Broadcast is when you record a message and then send that message to a whole bunch of people. It happens a lot during election season. Last November, for instance, I got a call that Susan Sarandon had recorded, encouraging me to vote yes on Prop 19, California’s “pot amendment.” 
Voice Broadcast is often confused with Outbound IVR. They are very similar, but if Susan Sarandon were to say something at the end of that recorded message like, “Press 1 if you’d like to donate to support Prop 19, or 2 to be connected to your representative’s office,” that’s an Outbound IVR. The IVR would then connect the call to a live person who could take the donation information or forward the call on to my Congressman’s office. Voice Broadcast, on the other hand, would be more appropriate if the message was all you needed to convey, without any further action. It’s often used for emergency notifications, like announcing school cancellations. Oh, to get even more confusing, if you only have one key-press that will forward the call on somewhere, the Voice Broadcast campaign can handle that. But if it’s any more than that, you’re in IVR territory. I know. Sorry.

Are we there yet? Almost. Finally, we have our newest product (drum roll)…

• SMS Broadcast. These messages work much like Voice Broadcast, except instead of a recorded voice message, it’s a text message. It’s a cool marketing vehicle for exclusive discounts or time-sensitive alerts such as, “It’s the last day to get free shipping in time for Valentine’s Day.” The SMS broadcast can also include a hyperlink to connect smartphones to the business’s website. Other applications for text messages include appointment reminders or confirmations, medication reminders, and traffic alerts.

Okay, so that’s a brief (brief?) overview of our products. So now that we’ve gone through the basics, how would you describe what it is that we do, and more importantly, what we help businesses do?

We at CallFire are all ears.

by Natalia Klishina

This past weekend was UCI’s homecoming, and the UCI Alumni Association already had a plan to get the message out. Same as last year, they recorded a message providing information on when and where the basketball game would take place, as well as urging alumni to reserve their tickets now by going to the alumni website. CallFire dialed 42,000 numbers at a rate of 400 calls per minute, each call ending with the message, “This call is powered by alumnus-owned CallFire.com, pay-as-you-go group messaging.” Later this spring, the Paul Merage School of Business will also be using CallFire. They’ll be sending out nearly 2,000 reminders for their 2011 Reunion with our voice broadcast technology. It’s a quick and simple solution to getting the word out to thousands of people at once, for one low cost. So if you are in some way involved with an educational institution — whether it’s a small kindergarden or a large university like UCI — check out these ways you could use CallFire cloud telephony services:

5 Ways Educational Institutions Should Use Cloud Telephony

1. EVENTS: Schools, colleges, and universities can use CallFire voice broadcasts or SMS blasts to send invitations and reminders about upcoming events. A great example is what UCI’s Alumni Association did with their homecoming reminders — or what the Merage business school will be doing with their 2011 reunion. No matter how small or big your institution and no matter what kind of event it is, with pay-as-you-go broadcasting services, CallFire can provide an easy, affordable way to notify any number of people. You can even get creative and automatically collect RSVP’s by inserting a simple phone tree (IVR). CallFire will then collect and report all that data right back to you so that you can plan your event for a specific number of people.
2. EMERGENCY NOTIFICATIONS: Use CallFire to notify everyone on and off campus about emergencies. Having an evacuation or lockdown? Send out simultaneous pre-recorded voice and sms broadcasts to all students, faculty, and even parents. Remember to have a few practice drills first (perhaps only including students and faculty)! Having a sudden snow day? We wouldn’t know anything about that here in LA, but we hear schools cancel classes on snow days. CallFire can provide you with an easy way to send out a last-minute reminder. (Just don’t do it like Prince George’s County School Board and call parents at the ungodly hour of 4:30am.) Please refer to one of our previous articles to read more about how CallFire is best used in emergency situations.
3. ALUMNI DONATIONS: Are you calling alumni to ask them for donations? I know you are, since I’m definitely receiving these calls. Make it easier for students to contact alumni for donations with CallFire’s power dialing technology. You can allow your agents to call from anywhere and monitor their activity from your account. CallFire can automatically hang up or drop messages on answering machines, connecting your agents to live people one after another and speeding up the process nearly two-fold.
4. CLASS UPDATES: Professors and teachers, take matters into your own hands. Make sure your messages always reach your students — even the ones who claim to not get your e-mails. Upload your students’ phone numbers into CallFire and send out SMS reminders about large assignments being due, schedule changes, classroom relocations, and special events you’d like them to attend. Leave no excuse for lateness or forgetfulness. You and I both know students check their text messages 24/7 (even when in class).
5. HIGH SCHOOL APPLICATIONS: Take a leap into the high-tech future (or present, rather) at your admissions office, and automate your correspondence with applicants. You can do this in a number of creative ways. For example, you could allow interested high school students to sign up for SMS reminders about scholarship opportunities or upcoming application deadlines. It’s something I would have certainly found useful in high school, and the number of schools an average high school student applies to is only going up, making it harder to keep track of all the different deadlines. Another useful application would be to upload lists of accepted and rejected applicants once final decisions are made, and to notify them by phone. You could do this with a pre-recorded message from your dean, or with a simple text message. Take all the waiting out of the process!

And don’t limit yourself with these 5! Get creative and come up with new ways to make voice and sms technology work for you. Give us a call at 877.897.FIRE to help put your ideas into action.

A common question we get at CallFire is how to add numbers to a campaign that’s already running. If the campaign has finished, you’ll want to create a subset campaign, and you can learn how to do that in this nifty video featuring our solutions guru Ryan.

If your campaign is still active, you can use the “Copy Campaign” functionality, which will save you a lot of time. All your settings, inputs, and sound files will be preserved so that you don’t have to recreate them.

The first step is to log into your Admin account and select the campaign that you’d like to duplicate. Put a check in the checkbox all the way over to the left.

Next, look up top at the Campaign Control drop-down menu. Choose the “Copy Campaign” selection and hit “go.”

Input a new campaign name in the New Campaign Name field.

Next you’ll be asked to add more numbers to your copied campaign. You can either choose a PhoneBook that’s maintained in your CallFire account, or you can upload a new list of numbers (.csv, .xls, or .xlsx formats). Renew your agreement to the legal terms, and hit “submit.”

Your copied campaign has saved all your original campaign settings, and is now ready to run.

Have questions? Email support@CallFire.com, or attend a weekly webinar.

by Kimberly Kohatsu

On Wednesday, January 12th, Aaron Titus was awakened at 4:33 AM.

His phone rang, with an automated message from the Prince George’s County School Board announcing that school would be delayed by two hours.

Titus was infuriated. He had already heard about the delayed opening the night before, and to be awakened at 4:30 was ridiculous in his mind.

Titus didn’t take the unwelcome call lying down. He found a robocall company online (we don’t know which one), recorded a message, and uploaded the numbers of nine Prince George’s County School Board members, its superintendent, and general counsel.

At 4:30 AM Thursday, their phones rang to Aaron’s message,

“This is a Prince George’s County School District parent, calling to thank you for the robocall yesterday at 4:30 in the morning. I decided to return the favor. While I know the school district wanted to ensure I drop my child off two hours late on a snow day, I already knew that before I went to bed. I hope this call demonstrates why a 4:30 a.m. call does more to annoy than to inform.”

By Friday, Titus’s story was picked up by the Washington Post, and he was interviewed on WashingtonPost.com, Fox, ABC, CBS, Good Morning America, MSNBC, Fox & Friends, and several local affiliates.

Clearly, his story has struck a nerve.

So how can you ensure that your CallFire Voice Broadcast campaigns don’t meet the same terrible fate?

1. Double- and triple-check your campaign settings. The school’s announcement was sent at the early morning hour by a simple human error. This can be avoided by checking over your work.
2. Maintain an internal Do-Not-Call list. Your internal DNC list in the CallFire interface should be kept up-to-date and used in every subsequent campaign you run.
3. Add yourself to your own campaigns. CallFire sends broadcasts at a rapid rate of at least 50 calls per minute. However, if your own phone number is among those called, and you accidentally set the time incorrectly, you can stop your campaign midway and hopefully save whoever’s left. You’ll still upset the people who have been called, but may be able to minimize the damage.
4. Follow best practices even better. Titus recalls he doesn’t know when he agreed to receive phone notifications. Assuming the PG County School Board followed best practices, he probably did agree at some point. It is essential that you clearly communicate the intent to use your contacts’ phone numbers for broadcast messages. (Also, for business communications, FTC rules require agreement. In a non-profit’s case, like a school district, they would not be subject to this requirement. Still, informing parents that they’ll be added is a good idea. Clayton, MO schools allow parents to opt out, but they must renew that opt out every year).
5. Include opt-out information in your broadcasts. End every message with opt-out instructions, such as “To discontinue receiving phone notifications, call xxx-xxx-xxxx.” You can also use Hosted IVR to add a press-1 capability to connect the called party to someone in your organization that can remove them from your list.
6. Consider SMS Broadcasts instead. For quick messages such as this 2-hour delay, a text message would have been less likely to awaken parents, would be received much more quickly, and have the same informative effect.

Follow these steps and your broadcasts, voice or text, will work to your benefit, and your contacts’.

by Dinesh Ravishanker, CEO

From the video:  “CallFire is in the virtual call center business. This puts our software at the forefront conversation for Political Phone Banks in the United States.  During each election season we experience double, sometimes triple the virtual call center usage we see at any other point in the year.  Moreover, our solutions team consults with political marketers to design powerful telephone surveys and notification campaigns critical to campaign managers interested in voter preference and geography relevant analytics.  These campaigns also provide less educated voters with digestible information required to make a next-day voting decision.

Over the course of 6 years in cloud telephony consulting, my team and I have participated in countless confidential conversations with technologists and campaign managers.  Often we discuss the marketing and advertising strategy used to garner support for their candidates.   Time and time again, we find political advertising strategies are not terribly different from a good brand advertising strategy.  Here are a few political advertising strategies that I have seen used over the last few years.”

Political advertising strategies

• Creativity – differentiate your candidate by developing a persona
• Use fresh voter registration data lists and don’t annoy voters
• Market your candidate in search results on Google and Bing
• Place site-targeted ads for your candidate on Political Websites
• Use Voice Broadcast target geographies with tailored messages
• Accept campaign contributions online, via phone & snail mail
• Enable volunteers to make voter-outreach calls from home
• Use data from phone or social media surveys for targeting
• Tailor communication by age, location & political affiliation
• Use a “Google surge” or “Network blast” in the days before an election
  
• Partner with an experienced Political Technology company (references below)
  
• Read our entire blog post on Political Marketing Tips in the Cloud

Keep It Simple Stupid

CTA (or Call-To-Action) & KISS (or Keep-It-Simple-Stupid) are probably the most overused acronyms board rooms and marketing meetings around the world.  But lets face it – most politicians have a lot to say, so it is extremely important to distill your candidate’s values in a clear and concise manner.  In the case of telephone marketing, a 30-40 seconds message works best, with the option to learn more if the listener desires.  In the case of social media advertising, some Twitter studies indicate that clickthrough rates are largely affected by CTA.  Advertisers who push products or services often use CTAs like  “click here for a Free Trial”, or “Learn more.”  In the dozens of political sound files I have personally listened to, almost all of them had a similar CTA.  Namely, “Vote for me, [candidate name] on election day” or “Press-1 to Donate Now”.   If you’re interested in optimizing a voice campaign, read the top 5 methods to making a successful Political Voice Blast.

Study historical data

There exists a plethora of political data on the web in the form of case studies, blogs and raw data.  So, why make the Political Advertising mistakes someone has already made for you?   Although this advice seems elementary, remember to DO YOUR RESEARCH.  We assume that’s why you’re reading this blog now.  Here are a few links to get you started:

Case studies
MoveOn.org uses Cloud IVR to collect voter data (LINK)
Equality California uses Cloud Call Center to harness the power of volunteers at home (LINK)
Thomas Kennedy wins Citrus County using Voice Broadcast (LINK)

Professional references
Patrick Michael Kane – Technology driven political advocacy expert, CTO & founder.  Former lead technology consultant for MoveOn.org, One.org, OFA and ActionKit.com clients.  Website: http://www.actionkit.com
Brian Donahue – Political Consultant & Founder of Craftdc.com Mr. Donahue has managed 4 Federal election campaigns and served on 2 presidential campaign staffs and Headed national 72-hour Task Force for RNC. Mr. Donahue also served as the Executive Director for Bush-Cheney ‘04. Website: http://www.CraftDC.com

Media
Dan Siroker Video – “How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election” Stanford University & Dan Siroker – the former Data Analytics Manager for the Obama campaign.

Video: Brian Donahue – Political Strategist: http://www.gspm.org/brian-donahue-video -
Election Assistance Commission – Data from the 2008 election. Download the full report as zip.

by Kimberly Kohatsu, Marketing

A series of tornadoes touched down recently in Missouri, Arkansas, and Illinois. Homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed, power went out, trees were downed, and unfortunately, several lives were lost.

People who have been affected by the storms have been staying with friends or family, in hotels, or in ad-hoc shelters. They likely don’t have regular access to the internet to read an email or check a website, but because they probably do have their cell phones by their side, CallFire’s Voice Broadcast is an effective way to relay critical information.

Firefighters and emergency responders would say the same. They use notification plans to keep people out of harm’s way during natural disasters, inform them about evacuations, or to send an all-clear. One dispatch manager described it as “the most valuable tool we’ve had since 911.”

Now businesses, schools, and organizations are following suit. Think about it:

Say, for instance, you are an insurance company. You know that after all these tornadoes, there will be a lot of property claims. You want to make people aware of the steps to take before filing them. So you upload a list of all your clients with homes in Missouri, Arkansas, and Illinois. You give them helpful tips such as

• Make sure you photograph damaged items where you find them before moving them
• Make temporary repairs as needed to prevent additional damage
• Keep receipts for these repair expenses
• If you’re forced to leave your home due to evacuation or severe damage, keep receipts for your living expenses
• Then, you include the phone number to report a claim

With Hosted IVR, you can even add a press-1 capability to connect the person being called to a live representative.

But that’s just one example. January also brings snowstorms, and this season we’ve already seen blizzards across the Midwest, Northeast, and even snowstorms in parts of California. Inclement weather means cancellations, office closures or delays, and hazardous conditions.

When I was a kid, if there was snow on the ground, the morning ritual was to crank up the radio and obsessively watch the scrolling ticker on the local tv news hoping one or the other would announce your school was closed.

But that was then. Information travels a lot faster now, and nothing travels quite as fast as text messages. It’s not just about the speed of sending—what’s even more key in emergencies is how quickly texts are read. According to mobileSQUARED, 90% of texts are read within the first three minutes of being received. Imagine sending a near-instantaneous text to all your employees so that they know if they should work from home, if any roads are closed, or if your business is shuttering for the day.

In any emergency situation, speed is of the utmost. So here are a five ways to help make sure your CallFire emergency alerts can be sent at a moment’s notice:

1. Know the drill. Log into your CallFire account and familiarize yourself with the interface so you can act quickly. Make sure everyone that may need to send notifications does, too. If you need help setting up your alert system, remember that we hold webinars every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
2. Get the necessary opt-ins. Voice broadcasts or bulk texts can only be sent to people who have agreed to receive them. Get all the permissions you might need from your employees, clients, or other contacts. Tell them how you intend to use mass notifications, and get their agreement.
3. Organize your contacts. Keep your contacts well organized in an Excel spreadsheet or .CSV so that you can easily sort them by department, essential/non-essential status, geographic office, or any other designation that could potentially be helpful.
4. Send a test message. This will verify the accuracy of your contact list, make everyone in your organization aware the notification system is in place, and help you iron out any kinks along the way.
5. Run routine practice sessions. No one likes to think about emergency situations, but just like in Boy Scouts, you should always be prepared. Schedule a few run-throughs of various scenarios and continue to tweak and improve, so that if the need does arise, you’re the best you can be.

by Natalia Klishina



One of the duties I’ve been tasking with recently is to begin duplicating our Google AdWords campaigns into Microsoft AdCenter. In preparation, I read a bunch of the stuff out there by people who had already compared the two. I even compiled a spiffy PowerPoint presentation for the office from everything I’d learned. I then went on to actually upload our campaigns into AdCenter, figuring out more and more effective ways to do so as I went. Along the way, I also came over a few useful details you won’t learn from Google or Microsoft. To summarize some of the more interesting points:

• Google has 62.90% of the core search share, and Bing 31.70% (Sep. ’10 Comscore).
• Because of this, AdCenter is much cheaper. We transferred our campaigns with bids at only 1/4 of our bids on AdWords. Our average CPC on Bing is somewhere around 1/4 or 1/5 of our average CPC on Google.
• Both use broad/phrase/exact/negative match, but Bing does not have the “modified broad” option that AdWords provides.
• AdWords will let you evenly rotate OR optimize your ads, while AdCenter automatically optimized them by CTR (click-through rate). Normally, you want to optimize them anyway, but we used the rotation option at CallFire at first just to collect some analytical data on specific differences in our ads.
• The bidding system is the same for both: you pay $.01 more than the next-highest bidder, all other factors equal.
• Unlike Google, which bills you in cycles, AdCenter is pre-pay only. You can then recharge your account when your balance runs out, or set it to automatically recharge.
• AdCenter has this nifty “price estimation tool,” which you can access by selecting the ad-group in the campaign tab, clicking “add or edit keywords,” clicking “next,” and expanding “advanced options.” This will let you see estimates of the position/CPC for specific bid amounts (remember that these are only estimates).

The easiest way to transfer campaigns from Google AdWords into Microsoft AdCenter:

Now for what is probably the most useful part of this post…

THINGS I HAVE LEARNED THROUGH TRIAL BY FIRE:

Hope this may have helped some of you out there, and please feel free to shoot any further questions at me.

by Natalia Klishina

We’ve been hard at work here at CallFire lately trying to figure out some ways to provide our customers with better support, and one idea we’ve hit on is that perhaps this begins with providing more support to our support team. So here are some tools our developers have put in place in the last couple of weeks with just that goal in mind:

• Load balancing engine: When calls come in with a call status error, or perhaps a call status of rejected, the ops team can now route calls through different carriers to ensure successful delivery of messages and better call quality.
• Campaign administration: Need to send more than 50 calls a minute? CallFire’s dev team has built a tool that will allow the ops team to increase a client’s calls-per-minute (cpm) rate, so that those messages can reach recipients even sooner.
• Number administration: If a customer buys a phone number from CallFire and calls are, for some reason, still not being forwarded a few days later, the ops team can now view the purchase date and unique ID number assigned to that phone number, allowing the support team to provide expedited service and resolve the matter even quicker.

Those might or might not all make sense to you, but the goal is pretty simple: make it easier for our support team to help you. It’s just one of the ways in which CallFire strives to provide an excellent customer experience to all our users.