MSN adCenter

History

MSN was late to enter the search market, both in terms of providing its own search database or a pay-per-click advertising tool. However, as the second largest search property after Google, MSN finally realised the need to offer its own PPC service within the MSN search results, rather than rely on sponsored listings from its key competitor, Yahoo!. Following initial tests of the new MSN adCenter in France and Singapore, MSN is now running its PPC service in the US for selected advertisers and will be launching later in 2006 within the UK market.

Strengths

The format of MSN's PPC service is similar to Google AdWords, but it also provides an added level of campaign targeting and management. By using the data from MSN's numerous registered users who have signed up to Hotmail, Passport and Messenger services, MSN will use this data, when available, to provide demographic data to their PPC search market management and response data. Advertisers can place higher bids to boost their listings if searchers match their selected market profiles and although this data won't always be available, it could prove useful.

The other main advantage offered by the MSN adCenter is the ability for 'day parting', whereby you can stipulate at what time of day your adverts appear, or on which days of the week if these can affect the responsiveness of your campaign. This can potentially give the advertiser much more control over their spend and a greater ability to test the responsiveness of their advertising programme.

Weaknesses

This has yet to be seen. MSN should be taking advantage of their knowledge gained from the established Google and Yahoo! PPC services and currently the only restrictions will be the search market covered, although this could potentially be quite large through the MSN network.

If you are looking to start running pay-per-click advertising with any of these providers or need to improve the effectiveness of your current campaign, find out more about our PPC management service or contact us now for more information.