MSN launches AdCenter pilot

MSN was reported launching its new pay per click platform for a pilot in France and Singapore two weeks ago and has made public a call for a test panel in the US on Thursday last week.
Microsoft’s game plan concerning a new MSN PPC platform was disclosed earlier this year.
Senior vice president of MSN information services Yusuf Medhi, who oversees the software giant’s strategy, marketing and development for MSN Search, extended the initial invitation to participate the Ad Center pilot program. However the new generation advertisement search program is reporting a massive amount of inquiries, they will be inviting people into the pilot on a rolling basis for the next 18 months. Participation may be attempted at the following: http://advertising.msn.com/searchadv/PilotForm.asp

So-called “next-generation paid per click advertisement” by Microsoft, AdCenter should bring internet marketers the lack of freedom, market segmentation and datamining capabilities reported missing on both Yahoo’s sponsored search network and somewhat on Google Adwords.
Professional search engine marketing firms, business owners and all internet marketers will be given the opportunity to target their audience with extreme accuracy through a new market segmentation technology. For example, beta tests conducted on the French market return significantly valuable data concerning “wine” industry related searches says Microsoft.
Flexibility and control will be MSN promotional campaign additional keywords towards potential media buyers. The Redmond Software company is willing to increase market shares heading in the Small and Medium business direction, which direction was already chosen when launching enterprise type of solution such as Microsoft CRM.
Over 90% of Us businesses would count less than 4 employees, bill Gates probably sees there the future of its new engine. Still MSN did not mention the major threat advertisers face on competitive markets: click fraud.

Another issue that could be pointed out to Yusuf Medhi is the market of the search engine itself. MSN search constantly increases and delivers result pages which quality compares to leader Google but lacks of massive traffic with about 9% of overall searches, according to a recent survey conducted by Jupiter Media. The whole ad network is another question, what are the big players on the market willing to publish ads from MSN better than from Google or Yahoo. We recently uncovered that acquiring AOL would be an option for MSN in order to make a significant entry in that competition.

So far competition has always been good and new marketing tools by AdCenter shall be copied by Google And Overture. The online advertisers should find their way and decide which solution shall provide them with the best return on investment. We’ve signed up for the US beta testing and are hoping to post our feedback here on this blog.