PPC Blog » MSN

Microsoft To Acquire Yahoo In 2007?

PPCblogger — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 17:29:27 +0000

There’s a interesting post over at the Shoemoney blog where Jeremy Shoemaker gives 10 reasons why he believes Microsoft will make a move to purchase Yahoo.

Keeping the 10 reasons Shoemoney gave short and sweet, they are;

The Search Algorithm

Overture Yahoo Search Marketing

Yahoo Publisher Network

Flikr

Del.icio.us

The People

Video

Community Properties

Business Directory

Yahoo Just Cleaned The House (reshuffle)

Will it happen? To me it seems like a no brainer… If Microsoft hopes to compete in this new internet economy (contextual ads) they need a bigger chunk of the search market. Yahoo is the only option IMO.

What do we think?

MSN (Windows Live) & Lycos Top Searches Of 2006

PPCblogger — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 18:43:26 +0000

Off the back of Yahoo’s & AOL’s recent 2006 search statistics both the Windows Live Search blog & Lycos have announced their top searches of 2006.

Top Overall Searches at Windows Live Search in 2006:

Ronaldinho
Shakira
Paris Hilton
Britney Spears
Harry Potter
Eminem
Pamela Anderson
Hilary Duff
Rebelde
Angelina Jolie

The Lycos top 10 overall search terms for 2006 are:

Poker
MySpace
RuneScape
Pamela Anderson
Paris Hilton
Pokemon
WWE
Golf
Spyware
Britney Spears

MSN adCenter System Bug Causing Adverts To Show Intermittently

PPCblogger — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 14:46:55 +0000

I have finally had it confirmed by MSN UK that they are experiencing issues with adverts that are appearing intermittently after every ‘X’ number of refreshes.

This is a system bug and hence a fairly widespread problem affecting many advertisers on the network. MSN’s tech support team are trying to address the issues currently, but this has been an issue for sometime already.

Unfortunately there is nothing advertisers can do apart from wait for the problem to be rectified…

Microsofts Advanced Match Laughable

PPCblogger — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 19:14:35 +0000

I find it incredible just how bad Microsoft’s advanced keyword match option is. Adavanced match or ‘broad match’ as its known on Google basically allows the search engines to add additional words to your keyword phrase, in any order so that your advert appears against plurals or variations. Obviously this type of match is less targetted and in a lot of cases less relevant as terms you do not want to appear against can be ‘matched’….(this is why negative keywords should be used).

I have seen some strange broad matching many times, however, Microsoft / MSN Adcenter seem to have unearthed new levels of complete irrelevance in their advanced match option it’s actually scarey.

Without picking on this advertiser for any reason bar being the first completely irrelevant advert I could find with tracking – its quite interesting to see what searches adverts can display for with such ease and in many cases not obvious terms either. Obviously this look hinges on the accuracy of the keyword tracking, but I have seen so many instances of this, I believe it to be completely accurate.

A dating company in particular called Dating for Parents happened to be the first I came accross. Check out some of the examples below.

Under a search for ‘Golf Club’

You can see their advert appears. Why? Well, from their tracking we can see its matching against ‘Dating Club’.

Relevant huh? It gets better.So if you think thats fairly irrelevant, try searching for anything with ‘club’ pretty much. Say a ‘night club‘ or ‘boat club‘? They come right up again. So MSN seems to be matching fairly heavily against not just the main prefix, but also the suffix. Which means possible terms for advanced match could be fairly limitless.So here are some more examples. Take a look at a search for ‘manchester builders‘

So what could this be matching against? Believe it or not, ‘Dating in Manchester’. Again… its matching against ‘manchester’ simply being in the keyword, which could hardly be less relevant its laughable. That’s only because its not my money though.

So as before, if MSN is matching terms against club, whats it matching against manchester? How about a search for ‘jobs in Manchester‘

or ‘surfboards in Manchester‘?So who has their keywords set as advanced match in MSN Adcenter without negatively mactching everything under the sun?!

MSN Search Redirecting to Microsoft Live

PPCblogger — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 20:56:37 +0000

If you haven’t already seen this, the old http://search.msn.co.uk is now redirecting to http://www.live.com/?searchonly=true.

So it seems Microsoft are finally ready to move away from the old MSN search name and move forward with the new Microsoft Live Search platform.

The redirect to the Live domain only seems to be the case if you search directly from http://search.msn.co.uk however. As shown below -

If you visit MSN UK (http://uk.msn.com/) and perform a search from here, it keeps within the same domain although shows Live results as shown below -

What happened to the infinite scroll feature to? This was where you didn’t need to change page, just keep scrolling down.