Yesterday we reported on MSN's PPC Program that was buzzing all over the Web frontier. Well, it is official, they are building out their own "Paid Listings Program" to compete with Yahoo!'s Overture and Google AdWords. All those that had a sneak peak at the PPC interface and features were impressed, so that is a major plus. Danny Sullivan wrote a nice article on MSN To Launch Its Own Paid Listings Program, but if your not an SEW Member, then for the detailed version of this article, it is worth the $99, simply for this article alone.
I'll give you a little nuggets from the article, but I strongly recommend you become a member, plus they have a satisfaction guarantee of "refund your membership fee within 30 days of signing up, for any reason." Ok it is getting to sales man like, sorry about that. On to the quotes:
They see the platform as a one stop shopping-style solution for advertisers who wish to purchase all types of MSN advertising in one place
Wider Rollout Date Not Set
The setup I was shown for this was seriously impressive in terms of the amount of targeting control you can exercise. Want to pay more for ads to show up for a certain period of the day? No problem. Want some creative to be shown to women; other creative shown to men? It's there.
Targeting will tap into MSN's registered user database, which lets it know the profile of those who've enrolled with the service. Even if they aren't signed in, the presence of an MSN cookie will let MSN know who is performing a particular search.
The last quote is interesting, based on an slashdot article. Serving up user based targeted ads based on Microsoft tracking your Web usage. This was a lot like how DoubleClick got beat up with the whole persistent cookie tracking issues with their ads in 2000 or so. Anyway, I posted a thread on that subtopic at SEW Forums under the title Microsoft Search Advertisers Gets TOO Personal.
Again, the article has lots of good information, so its worth a full read - here is a link to Danny's blog entry as well.
