MSN’s New Program Increases Need for Automated Campaign Management
By Sage Peterson
June 2005
The announcement of MSN’s own pay per click advertising program created numerous headlines within recent weeks. And while the formal rollout of their “Ad Center” product several months from now will represent a number of innovations, its launch promises to cause a significant increase in the workload of marketers managing pay per click advertising campaigns. And that may turn out to be the tipping point that leads more marketers to outsource the management of their paid search campaigns to search marketing agencies.
Recognize that advertisers can currently buy pay per click ads on Google and Overture and cover the 95% of the paid search marketplace with just two media buys. But it isn’t quite that simple. Advertisers still have to manage campaigns that often target more than 1,000 keywords, and do so on two very different platforms.
Overture, as most know, is a straight-forward auction model. If your competitor is in position #1 bidding $2.00 per click, you can raise your bid to $2.10 and move into position #1 – pushing him to position #2.
In Google, your position is determined not just by the amount you bid, but also by the click-through rate on your ad. Because of this, if you are paying $2.00 per click in position #2, your competitor in position #1 may be paying only $1.25 per click but have a higher click-through rate. So the strategy to optimize a campaign in Google is more complicated, requiring control over more variables than with Overture.
Enter MSN’s Ad Center. Though the system may change between now and its official rollout, one thing is certain. It will be different from the programs in both Google and Overture. MSN has raised the bar by offering in-depth demographic information on specific keywords. Want to reach women consumers under 30 who earn more than $75,000 per year? You’ll have the data, by keyword, to do just that. However, while increased demographic profiling data brings increased targeting opportunities, it also causes more work for advertisers.
Think of the amount of work required to manage a search marketing campaign on two search engines. Now envision the incremental time that’s going to be required to manage that same campaign on a third, entirely new search engine with an entirely new and different bidding platform. Soon, marketers will face:
Raising and lowering bids on three search engines, not two
Writing ads for three search engines, not two
Building landing pages for three programs, not two
Optimizing three campaigns, not two
In less than two years, pay per click advertising will become so time consuming and cumbersome that it won’t be feasible to conduct successful campaigns without automated bid management technology.
It’s time to identify a vendor who has developed automated bidding technology and begin learning about their product. By the time MSN’s product launches, you want to be sure you’re taking advantage of its power – or finish behind a competitor who is.
