evilgreenmonkey

With MSN adCenter’s 6 month anniversary fast approaching, it seems the perfect opportunity to review the product. Anyone that has worked with the tool from the beginning can tell you that things didn’t start exactly to plan – the phrase, couldn’t hit a barn door with a banjo springs to mind; but have things changed?

Within the first month of launching, setting up new accounts or implementing changes was a pipe dream, consistently taking over 2 weeks for even the most simple of updates. But this was only the tip of the iceberg; keywords and creative started being bizarrely disallowed, budget and booking mistakes occurring – together with one of the slowest PPC interfaces you’re likely to come across. It was clear they’d bitten off more than they can chew, setting live hundreds of accounts containing thousands of variables within a couple of days. It’s hardly a surprise then that their IT department vetoed the launch a couple of days before.

One thing that has never been in question is the quality of traffic, although there are variables between verticals – there have been numerous occasions when the conversion rate has vastly outperformed even Google. This doesn’t come as a surprise, given their strict approach of avoiding the thousands of traffic driving partners used by Yahoo and MIVA. The obvious flip side to this is volume; I’m yet to hear of any major signings – despite much discussion about the major European ISP and Telco Orange. As result, competition for the small inventory of quality traffic they provided was, and remains, very high. The talk of companies being able to cash in on cheap starting prices was very short lived – to the extent of CPCs being equal to or above Google within days. The progression was so dramatic that you would often find the bid for top position doubling within a day – thankfully that cooled off swiftly.

There does remain however, an under used tail where you can find cheap traffic – but only very low volumes. As the MSN network expands, this is a place to watch for future gains.

This is all well and good, but when it takes a day for the system to respond to CPC changes for example, is there any point? The answer is simple; yes – everyone is in the same boat, be that agency, direct or even MSN themselves, we all use the same system. So just like any of the other engines – you need to be the first, the biggest and the best. The poor performance of their system is not sufficient to stop its usability, and although the interface remains somewhat off the bar set by Google, the situation has been steadily improving.

So what does the future hold for adCenter? Well if Microsoft stand by their current approach, they will eventually start to sign large quality partners. This together with the increased proliferation of IE7 (and more specifically the search box in the top right of the new browser), should result in an dramatic increase in volume. In fact Google were so worried about IE7 that they went to court – despite taking exactly the same approach themselves with Firefox – and predicted up to a 30% swing in the market; rather a lot of amateur dramatics don’t you think? The future looks rosy in general, but much of the long term success depends on the other Microsoft software and whether it can remain top of the tree.

To summarise; MSN is the first engine on my schedule, firstly because everything takes so bloody long and secondly the traffic quality is the best in the business. Simple.