Even though Yahoo's board may try to reject the Microsoft takeover, there is no resisting the borg. Microsoft will buy Yahoo.
If you haven't tried Microsoft adCenter, they have a great promotion for US customers: they give $50 in free clicks when you sign up for a Microsoft adCenter Account.
I've griped about usability in the past, but for many of my campaigns, AdCenter has the highest conversion rates, more than Google AdWords or Yahoo Panama. The problem is low volume.
In all likelihood, Microsoft will buy Yahoo, and AdCenter will eventually have 35%+ search market share.
So get ahead of the game, and get started learning adCenter today.
Labels: adcenter, coupon, microsoft, yahoo
¶ 2/09/2008
Microsoft AdCenter is launching ContentAds (a contextual / AdSense competitor ) later this month.
As I warned a while back, AdCenter's default is to automatically add content ads distribution to your AdCenter campaigns.
You can avoid this potentially costly situation by opting out.
Caveat emptor
We're excited to announce the release of the Microsoft Content Ads Beta to all U.S. adCenter advertisers on August 29! With this release, you can extend your advertising reach beyond search, and choose how your accounts are upgraded.Choose how you want to upgrade
On August 29, you don't have to make any changes and your ad groups will automatically expand to hybrid distribution, meaning they will distribute to search and content pages.
Update:
You have to fill out a form so that your account can be "upgraded" without content ads enabled by default. Here's the message you get:
Thank you for completing the Content Ads: Upgrade to Content with only Search Distribution Active form.Your adCenter ad groups will be upgraded to Content Ads, but Content distribution will be turned off at the time of the upgrade. If you wish to turn on Content Ads at a later time, you are welcome to do so. Remember that all new ad groups created after the upgrade will be set to hybrid (expanded to both our search and content network).
They certainly are going out of their way to make it hard to not be automatically in ContentAds...
Labels: adcenter
¶ 8/21/2007
A friendly MSN adCenter rep called me today to get my feedback on adCenter. Well, as you can guess, I regaled her with an hour's worth of ranting. In exchange she looked at one of my adcenter campaigns and gave me a tip (paraphrasing here):
AdCenter likes small, relevant ad groups. Break up that big keyword list so you don't weigh down the overall average CTR with the speculative long-tail terms.
This is something obvious that I should know. It's true on Google and Panama as well. Make small adgroups of like terms. But apparently, that explains some of the lack of traffic in a comparison test of AdWords, AdCenter & Panama I wrote about.
So I'm going to try it and see how it works. I'm glad they called me - it's nice to be able to write something positive about Microsoft once in a while.
Labels: adcenter
¶ 6/07/2007
At the end of the month, I like to evaluate my campaign performance a bit more in-depth.
In late April, I set up a PPC campaign with 700 keywords, and 3 ads as identically as possible on Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing (aka Panama), and Microsoft AdCenter.
This campaign was in a high-value consumer electronics area, with a medium amount of traffic (no it wasn't "digital cameras").
So, for the first 30 days of May, here are the stat lines:
| Source | Clicks | CTR | Avg CPC | Total Spend | Conversion Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AdWords | 605 | 1.25% | 0.31 | $185.67 | 10.4% |
| Panama | 655 | 1.3% | 0.28 | $186.25 | 8.4% |
| AdCenter | 20 | 1.77% | 0.26 | $5.14 | n/a |
Just a couple of observations:
- I have no idea why AdCenter gets almost no traffic for this campaign!? Frankly, I don't spend much time analyzing adCenter anymore. Weird stuff like this means it's not worth the time.
- The volume and CTR similarity between Google and Yahoo is pretty amazing in this case. I usually see more volume from Google in most campaigns, but in competitive spaces, I think my Google volume is limited by not bidding more.
- The conversion rate difference between Google and Yahoo is something I find pretty consistent with other campaigns. My theory is simply that on the respective search networks, Google's partner quality is higher than Yahoo's. I.e. there aren't as many garbitrage sites in the Google network.
Labels: adcenter, adwords, panama
¶ 5/30/2007
Microsoft's adCenter has really gone downhill in performance lately. Along with declines in traffic, my accounts have seen big decreases in conversion and ROI.
On April 29, adCenter sent out a notice to advertisers changing their terms of use:
We're writing to notify you that your Microsoft adCenter Terms and Conditions are updated. The changes take effect on April 30, 2007.Some of the key adjustments to your Terms and Conditions include:
- Microsoft may use matching criteria other than keyword searches to display your advertisements.
- Microsoft may display your advertisements on its network of advertising channels operated by the Microsoft network of participating websites and other distribution outlets.
Basically, they are saying that your ads can now show up for any reason on any of their partners sites. So much for targeting search keywords!
Microsoft has already announced that they are testing an AdSense competitor, so this change certainly enables them to show your ads on content sites with some type of contextual matching.
However, Melissa M. from the SEM2 discussion group also points out that she's seen Microsoft buying IntelliTXT ads, and routing the clicks to a landing page of adCenter advertiser ads.
MSN is actually running Intellitext ads on content sites, sending visitors to a Live search page with adCenter ads on it. We saw a spike in clicks on a handful of keywords on 4/30, with no resultant increase in conversions, and I attribute it to this garbitrage by MSN.
She calls that Garbitrage. Which captures it perfectly. Check this thread for more details.
So I see a few big credibility problems for Microsoft stemming from this:
- A major TOS change with basically no notice. You could almost call it a "zero-day exploit".
- Funnelling low-quality untargeted traffic to search ad customers campaigns.
- Overall desperation and drop in traffic and performance.
It's hard to believe how bad Microsoft is at this whole thing... but they are, and I expect them to lose even more accounts as people see this junk get reflected in their stats.
¶ 5/02/2007
Do you advertise on MSN AdCenter?
Do you like your ROI?
Do you want to keep your hard-earned money?
Then PAY ATTENTION to Microsoft's upcoming launch of Content Ads.
Microsoft is sending out beta announcements about their launch of contextual ads (i.e. MSN's version of AdSense for Content). Buried in the details is this text:
This week, some of our U.S. advertisers will receive an e-mail notification that their accounts will be upgraded as part of the adCenter Content Ads pilot program. If you receive this notice, your campaigns will automatically be upgraded to include distribution on content pages within the Microsoft network.
AdCenter will set your existing campaigns to run on Content Ads BY DEFAULT!
That's a good way for you to lose a lot of money fast... so make sure you read how to disable Content Ads.
¶ 3/13/2007
