Microsoft adCenter Goes Live
Host | 9 May 2006 | Comments Off
Last week, Microsoft announced the launch of its pay-per-click advertising program on the MSN network at the MSN Strategic Account Summit. Originally named MSN adCenter, the product was completely rebranded to be the Microsoft adCenter. This program has been in limited testing since mid-October, and up until this past week, was only showing its advertisements some of the time, while showing Yahoo Search Marketing advertisements the rest of the time.
The adCenter works very similarly to Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing, in that you are able to “bid” for keywords that may be typed into the MSN search engine. What is going to make Microsoft adCenter different from the rest are the targeting features; advertisers will have the option to select who will see and ad, what geographic locations they wish to target, and even which day of the week or time of day that their ad is displayed.
Originally, the adCenter was only available through invitation, for which we received a small amount of here at Blizzard. We have been testing the product with a few of our clients in the hospitality industry through the Blizzard Sponsored Search Program, and have found the results to be quite satisfactory. The Promotion Department is not quite ready to roll this out to our entire client base yet, as we’d like to watch how the program continues to perform now that it is out of the Beta phase and the advertisements are appearing 100% of the time on MSN and their property sites. If all goes as expected, however, we anticipate rolling this out to all Promotion clients.
To read more about the release of the Microsoft adCenter, click on these two links:
Ballmer Challenges Google with Microsoft adCenter
Jackie Binion – Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.
