Sexy adCenter Features
Aug 2, 2007 Microsoft adCenter
Microsoft’s adCenter pay per click program is the newest kid on the block, at least this time around. You’ll still be hard pressed to find traffic estimates living up to their claims, but they do have some cool features that no other PPC program can match thus far. Demographics-based ad targeting is possibly the latest and greatest feature adCenter has to offer. You can now pay CPC premiums for clicks from your choice of user gender and age, on top of the old pillars of search including geographical location, time of day, etc.
So where does Microsoft get this potentially sensitive search user information? Think partner sites such as Hotmail, MSN Shopping, Xbox.com, and other sites that collect more than the standard fare of information. While talking to adCenter search evangelists on the Search Engine Strategies tour in Toronto, I learned that although their tracking isn’t perfect, it certainly is a step in the right direction for enhanced targeting. For instance, if you had an e-commerce site that sold women’s apparel and accessories, you may want to customize your maximum cost per click for the ads appearing on MSN and Live.com Search by bidding a premium for female searchers.
As I’ve mentioned already, the system is not perfect because of the way tracking demographic statistics works. Cookies for the partner sites previously mentioned are left on a user’s computer, but that isn’t to say the computer is dedicated to one user only. Many households have more than one computer, but not many that I know of have separate user accounts for each person in the house. Shared user accounts definitely throws a wrench in Microsoft’s plans.
Bidding a premium on gender and age demographics also has another potential drawback… tracking options. If you think you can actually track the traffic that is coming to your site that belongs to a certain age group or gender, think again. Granted, if someone registers on your site as a result of an ad they clicked, you can make an educated guess as to their gender, but asking age or date of birth crosses the privacy line for several users.
A good analogy for CPC premiums might be this: you can buy premium gasoline for your Toyota Tercel, but does it really make a measurable difference? How do you know you’re even getting higher octane fuel? The answer is you don’t, it’s something you have to go out of your way to test. Think about how you would test if premium gasoline made a difference, you’d have to take your Tercel to a performance shop with a dynamometer.
Another important factor here that relates to tracking demographics traffic is click fraud. Why? Think about it, you’re now paying a lot more per click to target a certain demographic, and you can’t track whether those users actually fit in that said demographic. How in the world are you ever going to analyze what fraction of your traffic is fraudulent? In upcoming blog posts, I’ll write about click fraud and how you can detect, report, and get money back from search engines using both your analytics tools and their reporting tools.
The moral of the story is that yes, Microsoft has taken the next step and challenged Yahoo and Google to improve their targeting options. And yes, most marketers would love to target based on age and gender demographics. But adCenter’s traffic numbers don’t justify paying a premium cost per click for these features, especially since their standard sponsored search bids are right up their with both Google and Yahoo. Plus, what marketer would actually pay a premium for unsubstantiated, untraceable traffic, throwing caution to the wind - so to speak?
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