MSN UK Paid Listings: How is it for you?

[Gooner151078]

I wanted to grab a moment to talk about the launch of MSN Live search in the UK and to allow others to share their experiences.

Paid listings launched in September of this year. To begin with everything went very well. The early adopters had an opportunity to get in quick and benefit from low cpc's and amazing cpa's. Everything is rosy for a couple of months bar a small glitch as referrer stats were not passed on.

Then, mid November, disaster struck. Despite having significant budget remaining for the month my listings gradually started to disappear. Speaking to our Adcenter rep they intimated that we should change match types and change our budget from divide equally to spend until depleted. We took a full download of our campaign and made all the alterations requested. This did not make any difference and this time MSN UK were stuck. Apparantly it was a glitch in the system which was resolved with no more explanation earlier this week.

However today, another system rollout from MSN and I have lost all listings altogether. in fact, as I speak they appear to have removed all paid listings in my sector (travel).

MSN is my second best performing engine. Even before MSN took control of the paid listings I had excellent CPA's as other advertisers naively believe PPC to a Google function.

I really appreciate that MSN have pushed a three year plan out in one but haven't paid listings been live in the US and France for some time now? Surely Adcenter functionality can merely be repeated in the UK? My trademarked brand term is protected if you are looking from America or France but not from the UK?

Perhaps the good folks at Yahoo! are the real losers here, my monthly budgets have rapidly decreased since MSN launched.

Interested to hear others experience? Was the US or French launch as fraught with problems?

[bluespark]

OK, first up I must confess to not having been able to give it more than a few hours attention, so it might well be me, but so far with MSN in the UK...
<rant>
The adcenter only works for me in Firefox! I can't get anything in IE
And the constant refreshing is irritating
I also found adverts disappearing for no reason I could work out. - You set the budget, you set to display until budget gone, and still it seemed to kill the adverts on all keywords completely after a day or so.
The average positions appear to me (so far) to be almost random numbers. It says position 25, I test and the ad is at positon 5. It says average 4, I test, the ad is at 15.
The impressions are low and the clicks are pathetic.
Agree that to begin with the CPC was low and that was the attraction, but the impressions are not improving and am increasing bids to improve positions - so very soon will give up as I feel I am wasting my time - better to spend time with what we know works.
Asked about setting up customer accounts and billing, was told would have to be spending thousands a month - with these impressions I don't know how anyone could!
As an agency they seem to have done nothing to encourage us to use them or recommend them - unless you include sending direct mail direct to all my clients(!)
</rant>
I wanted it to work, but so far dissappointed

[Gianluigi]

MSN works very well. When the UK went live, we were advertising from day one. Not many competitors were live, so CPA's were great, traffic also. Even now, half year later, with much more competition, traffic is very good and CPA's are still excellent. This because of their Demographic Targeting which works.

[Gottyman]

I've been following this link and it appears people do have different experiences of MSN.

My experience is that the management console is painfully slow and volumes are dramatically lower than Google. To illustrate, a client in the recruitment sector got 23,000 clicks last month on Google compared with 300 on MSN.

Also I cant get the bulk upload to work, no matter what I try. Does anyone have any advice on this?

Also I'm interested in what you mean by demographic targeting works. I am very skeptical of this, how do you gauge if its worked or not?

Thanks

[melissa106]

My experience of MSN Adcenter has been mostly good, despite a few initial problems (like not being able to get the bulk upload to work initially!)

I don't know if you have managed to get the bulk upload to work yet? (try saving the file as CSV rather than XLS, it seems to like this much better).

There are only 2 things that i find annoying and that is:

The limited number of keywords in the account (means we have about 4 accounts) and not being able to delete keywords easily (you have to scroll through each page until you come accross the keyword you want to delete).

Apart from that, the volumes are good and the costs are reasonable.

[Gottyman]

Melissa:

just wondering what sectors you are involved in and when you say the volumes are good- how do they compare with your Google volumes for the same stuff?

Cheers

[melissa106]

Hi Gottyman:

We're mainly in the finance sector.

I find google costs can be extremely competitve in this area, so MSN is much better value for money - which is why i say volumes are good since for the same spend you can have twice as many clicks on msn than google.

[raviverma]

I find the ROI is better than other paid n/w's.