I already knew the answer, but I thought I would check anyways. Below are my findings.
I was in South Dakota recently and they really like their buffalo. They like their buffalo so much that they will serve it any way you want it.
I decide to search for "Buffalo Bacon".
Here are the results.
| MSN | |
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The interesting thing here is not the size of the ads, not how much larger Google's ads are, but the relevance.
Google has links to recipes, places that sell bacon and Target, offering recipes and coupons.
MSN has links to bacon ringtones, two general bacon directories and one site selling meat.
Needless to say, the relevance of MSN's adCenter is severly lacking. Here is the point (you knew it had to be coming right?).
adCenter on their blog said, "Ad Ranking is your ad’s position on a search results page. Various elements affect your rank including relevance, click-thru rate, and bid price." Emphasis mine.
Relevance? Oh, adCenter even gives us an example of how their factoring works. It is basically the same as what AdWords has been telling us:
Now don't get me wrong, I think this is exactly how PPC should work, I just don't think adCenter should be talking about relevance until their ads are actually relevant.
Any opinions?
As the founder of a pay per click marketing company, I couldn't agree with your article more! I have never been a fan of MSN adCenter, their tools, or their advertising interface. So, all that said, something you may not be considering is the use of dynamic keyword insertion or DKI. It is pretty obvious that the ringtone advertiser is bidding on any and every keyword and simply using DKI to appear 'relevant' to each query. I think this would be a much bigger issue if these pay per click results were displaying in the organic listings.
Posted by: Jon Clark | November 2, 2007 2:49 PM | Permalink to Comment