The official Microsoft adCenter representative has confirmed that they are using Intellitxt ads "to drive trial and interest in Live Search itself."
Intellitxt is a contextual product that shows ads within the text you are reading for the those keywords in the content.
The thing is, they are driving search queries to their search engine, via the contextual networks.
Imagine you are reading a web site on sports, you then hover over a link that reads "sports" which takes you to a search query on "sports" at Live.com. Then your ad targeted for the keyword "sports" is displayed on Live.com. Is that the type of traffic you want?
Advertiser, Mel, said no:
Here's my issue with this campaign: we've found that visitors coming from this type of advertising tend to behave more like content network visitors than search visitors. In other words, they ran across the ad while reading an article on a content site, and are just idly browsing -- they're not in "buy" mode like someone who purposefully went to a search engine such as Live.com and typed in a query. And these visitors convert about the same (for us, anyway) as content visitors.However, the ad they were clicking on in this case was our search ad, with bids based on search economics. All of a sudden, our ROI on that keyword plummeted as a result. If these were content ads, I'd have been fine with it, because I'd have set my bids accordingly.
Mel wants a way to opt out.
We know Ask.com has marketed on Google and other engines to drive traffic to their search engine in the past. Here are two examples. I am not sure if Ask.com using the contextual network to advertiser, so the user intent is a bit different.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.
