Miva Updates Management Tools

Miva has upgraded its pay-per-click campaign management tools, and added broad-matching capabilities to its performance-based text ad network.

“As demand for paid search continues to outstrip supply, our ability to deploy user-friendly tools for advertisers and give them greater control over their ads puts us in a position to gain greater share,” said Tom Wilde, Miva’s General Manager, North America.

New features in its Ad Center campaign management product include the ability to create groups of ads that can be managed as a campaign for budgeting, scheduling, and reporting purposes. Inline reporting capabilities have also been added, making it easier for marketers to get to reports from the management console.

“It’s the highest level to manage, and the entry point to drill down,” Wilde said.

The same additions to the product are also immediately available in the API made available to developers. According to Wilde, while the number of companies using the API remains small, the amount of money those companies control is significant, since most of them are agencies.

Miva has also added a broad-matching capability to its keyword bidding system, similar to that offered by Google and Yahoo on their paid search products. With Miva Match, advertisers can opt to extend reach by showing their ads on more loosely related searches. The feature can be turned on or off at the keyword, campaign, or account level. Negative matching can be used to prevent an ad from appearing when certain keywords are included in the query.

Using exact keyword matching, if an advertiser bids on “used book store,” only ads with that exact set of keywords would be returned. With Miva Match, an ad could potentially be returned when a user searches on “used books,” “online used book store,” or “used computer book store.” Exact matches will appear first in listings, followed by Miva Match terms.