MSN adCenter - early review
So I got this invitation for MSN adCenter to try out their new advertiser service which is in beta to start with. With this new program MSN is opening up the ads space available on MSN network sites (mainly MSN search pages) for advertisers to place their ads. With adCenter MSN is entering in direct competition with more established programs like Google Adwords and Yahoo Overture.
In my experience the overall process of creating campaign and ads was simple (may be because I am used to adwords and overture) enough to be able create ads within few minutes. However comparing to Overture and AdWords there is no way to see the min bid required to get top ad position. There is other way around, advertiser has to specify a price and adCenter shows the estimated position, so this way I had to start with arbitrary high bid and then work it down till I was able to maintain the first estimated position, kinda tacky!
In research section (similar to overture bid selector and google keyword tool) it was surprising to see that for very competitive keywords adCenter was giving me first position for the bid of 0.05$, which was difficult to believe. Upon selecting the same bid and actually creating ads, I got position 7th. However adCenter has a cool side bar contained keyword research facility available which lists the number of times given keyword or key phrase was searched for last and current month. To get price/position estimates, user has to leave the order creation page to Research section (thus loosing the half entered order/campaign), I would say poor in terms of usability.
In adCenter, advertiser creates an ‘order’ for each campaign (one order contains one campaign). There could be any number of ads for any campaign (and so order). In the targeting section, adCenter offers three countries USA, France and Singapore.
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