MSN AdCenter Making More Changes

[AussieWebmaster]

Okay folks here they go again. I just received this email.

Over the course of the next week, all MSN Search results will migrate to Live Search. Live Search will be the branded, marketed search platform for Microsoft.

Currently MSN users can use our search tool through a variety of ways including MSN.com Home Page, throughout all channels of MSN including Hotmail, and Instant Messenger. Moving forward, Live Search will be the default search tool across the entire MSN network including www.microsoft.com . The attached document provides additional information and can hopefully answer your questions.


The attached file was:



Over the next 3 days, we plan to take the beta tag off of Live Search. All search boxes and toolbars on the MSN.com and Live.com properties are scheduled to be completely migrated to send users to the Live Search Engine Results Page--including those who search on Hotmail®, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, on all MSN.com properties, on http://search.msn.com and on www.live.com.



What does this mean for your campaigns on adCenter?

• All paid search advertisements will still be served by the Microsoft adCenter platform, so your campaigns, ads and keywords should continue to run as normal.
• In addition, we have conducted extensive testing and expect the advertising performance of Live Search to be as good as or better than on MSN Search.

Notable features of Live Search:

• Live Search lets us augment our search-engine investments with a customizable user experience. More than just an engine with a single search box, Live Search helps users personalize their search and more quickly find what is important to them.
• The Live Search interface is designed to display a better visual blend of paid and organic results. For example, you’ll find complementary fonts, less contrast around ads, and justification of ads with organic results.
• Best of all, with an updated search interface, Live Search is designed to attract and retain more searchers – to give you access to what you want – more traffic.

Learn more about the Live Search features at http://get.live.com or, try it out today at www.live.com

[fulton savage]

Cool new interface, Microsoft. When does the new search engine come out?

Web searches produce identical results to msn.com with the exception of the advertisements. A lot of times live.com cuts out ad number four and shuffles some of the ads in positions four and below.

[jbgilbert]

In addition, we have conducted extensive testing and expect the advertising performance of Live Search to be as good as or better than on MSN Search

Better be better cause as good says very little from what I can tell. At first (with few advertisers) we at least had cheap clicks. But today, even when there are few advertisers in a space, MSN has somehow jacked click prices up to near comparable levels with Google and Yahoo. It should not be that way.

[AussieWebmaster]

I have not seen any jacking... put there are more advertisers - and some of the new publishers are not closing as well as MSN itself so the quality is being diluted to meet the increase numbers.

[fulton savage]

Originally Posted by AussieWebmaster

I have not seen any jacking...

Me either. Prices are still about half of Google's for me.