adCenter Content All Hype, like Vista (or is it?)
Aug 29, 2007 Microsoft adCenter
If you’re like me and adopted Microsoft adCenter Content Network placements without resistance (to test the waters), you’ve probably noticed that the waters are pretty shallow. Not unlike PPC placements on SERPs, adCenter traffic just cannot contend with Google or even Yahoo. So here’s an interesting problem pointed out by Search Engine Watch forum members: how can one opt out of adCenter content placements? For those of you reading abstracts, click here to find out. For those of you that want to know why you should and shouldn’t consider opting out, continue on…
Rather than going into a long diatribe about why I am personally opting out of adCenter content placements, I’ll let you decide for yourself…
Arguments AGAINST opting out of Microsoft adCenter Content:
- New marketing placements are almost always a prime location to get in cheap with little competition (but since Microsoft opted everyone in automatically, this may be untrue)
- Placements are available on partner sites such as Fox sports, Live mail (formerly Hotmail), Live Messenger, and MSN channels and more
- Like me, you’ve stopped advertising on adCenter because of it’s lack of traffic (resulting in erratic unpredictable ROI) and need a good reason to test the waters again
- Microsoft hates to lose at anything, and are likely to get to the top eventually, even if it means buying their way there
Arguments FOR opting out of Microsoft adCenter Content:
- You never were comfortable with the cost of keywords in adCenter for the traffic that really goes through their search engine
- Anything released by Microsoft as a BETA is never good (think AntiSpyware…)
- You never opted into adCenter content placement
- ROI: Content placements just don’t work well for your campaigns
- You don’t have the budget, it’s just too darn new to throw money at
- Where are the tools that actually tell you where ads are placed, how often, for how many impressions, etc?
- I was hoping for more technical partner sites such as Microsoft TechNet and MSDN to name a few; currently not supported but hopefully on the horizon
- Limited reach: since Microsoft adCenter does not yet have a publisher tool such as Adsense, their reach is horribly limited to heavily self-promoting MSN sites (i.e. your ad for birdcages will appear on an MSN shopping page for birdcages…grrrreeeeeat)
As always, I’d love to hear your comments so feel free to chime-in on any of my points raised here. Or better yet, Digg this story!
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