Microsoft surprised everyone on Friday by releasing their “AdCenter”:https://adcenter.msn.com/default.aspx product to the general advertising public. While the birth of a third important provider of paid search results is exciting, the overall experience at this early stage is somewhat disappointing. Many advertisers are reporting bugs with keyword selection, among other things, and some users are experiencing abnormally long delays and hang times.
h3. Targeting Canadians
The interface clearly allows users to target Canada. However it seems as though the geo-targeting feature does not display the ads only to Canadians, like “Google AdWords”:https://adwords.google.com/select/ does. Rather it allows advertisers to bid higher for canadian clicks than for other clicks. I’m not too sure how well this form of geo-targeting will be received by Canadian advertisers trying to reach a Canadian audience.
Category: Search Marketing
It’s no secret. Microsoft is dead set on replacing Google as the reigning king of paid search advertising.
Even though their investments in developing better ad serving technology have been unbelievable, their share of the search pie has been absolutely stagnant. I could be wrong, but as far as I can remember, MSN search has been stuck at approximately 15% for at least 3 years now.
It seems they have found a shortcut to topple Google much faster than most anticipated. “According to the Wall Street Journal,”:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114662449016042303.html?mod=home_whats_news_us Microsoft appears interested in acquiring search juggernaut Yahoo!
I’m not surprised by this move. In fact, “it was my main prediction for the world of search in 2006.”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/01/09/polishing-the-search-crystal-ball
I’m halfway through the amazing two-day Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto and wanted to share a few juicy tidbits with One Degree readers right away. I’ll be posting more info gleaned from the conference over the coming weeks, but consider this an appetizer.
Danny Sullivan, Editor of Search Engine Watch, proposed a new definition of search engine marketing: “desire expressed via keywords” and predicted that anywhere you can type in words, search marketing will be there.