“Display your product or service to as many as 78 million potential customers”

When you visit the Microsoft Adcenter website, this is the caption that would greet you. Microsoft has come a long way in its competition with Google’s Adwords and has a niche market of its own. The ads hosted by Microsoft Adcenter are featured on Microsoft’s search engine Bing. After Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft has come up with a successful system to feature PPC (Pay per click)  ads. Until 2006, Microsoft would show these ads on the MSN search site. It also had a collaboration with Yahoo! and hosted their ads as well, until recently when the contract expiry prompted Microsoft to handle its own full fledged advertising.

The Web service API and the UI, both of which are provided by Microsoft for management of ads on their affiliate websites are built on the Microsoft .Net 2.0 framework.  The cost of the ads are determined in a manner similar to that of the Google Adwords. The highest price for Pay per Click (PPC) is determined by the advertiser. The importance of the ad, that is the position in which it will be displayed on every web-page is determined the popularity of the link which is determined through the advertisement’s CTR (Click through Rate).

The merging of Yahoo search with Microsoft’s Bing brought about a new revolution in the market of paid platform for search engines. Before Bing, the market was invariably divided between Google and Yahoo Search. The leftovers were pointed towards MSN search and other Microsoft search platforms.  The search results will be the same for both the Yahoo search website as well as for Bing, but the advertising platform will be managed by Microsoft’s Adcenter. This is big news for Microsoft and bad news for Google as the merged strength of Microsoft and Yahoo would provide stiff competition. The competition will thus break Google’s monopoly and serve as a check for both the companies who will be competing each moment to improve their services.

Microsoft has come a long way in the field of search engines and using ads in their newly formed Bing. It still remains to be seen if they can continue with their competition with the search giant, Google. Better interfaces, easier to use tools and exclusive offers could go a long way in popularizing Adcenter and Bing. But till then, Adcenter still remains a secondary option to Adwords.

Unlike any other form of advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) requires a collaborative effort between different departments. Three groups are generally involved in an effective making of a PPC campaign. Content writers who will research for relevant keywords and, which will go to be included in the ads. The ad managers who will oversee the performance and relatives going into the bidding processes, and finally the developers who will help implement technical details like the tracking codes.

Content Management

To begin with, it would be ideal to separate content with search. The contextual listings, campaigns need to be viewed differently from search since the results and customers also differ in this online marketing scenario.

Eliminating unwanted and waste traffic is a necessity and essential step to lowering costs and improving conversions. Most major pay-per-click providers will let advertisers create lists of negative keywords, which would eventually reduce traffic. However, this amounts to the wasteful traffic which would have eaten into your purse without adding any conversions.

It is easy to get traffic, what with you standing on the right side of the first SERP. Persuading the visitor, however, to make a purchase is another story. It would be smarter if in some way the pay-per-click advertiser is able to weed out all unwanted traffic and pay only for those conversions he is able to make. It is very important to keep an eye on the costs per conversion. This will mean cost-per-conversion is more relevant for the advertiser than paying per click.

Ad-campaign Managers

One way to control spending, here is by adjusting bid amounts, and not daily budget spending. Very often the funds are simply not available and demanding; but, if the campaign is correctly optimized, the returns should justify any amounts of spending. Advertisers should carefully lower the bidding costs in order to reach the maximum number of target customers. Daily budget control based spending leaves a lot of prospective customers untapped.

Usually, the number one spot leads to a very poor return on investment. Mostly, traffic coming from the top positions are not buyers, but simply are researchers. Serious buyers will generally go to the third, fourth, or fifth positions. However, when the consumers are ready to buy, they will often come back.

Bid exact, use exact matching, eliminate researchers and go straight to buyers. The traffic will decrease, but conversion and online revenue should definitely increase. Double and triple the keywords by creating broad, exact and phrase matches for every keyword. Review the analytics, then gradually eliminate broad and phrase matches that generally result in lower conversion rates.

Analytics & Developers

A reliable analytics program is essential in managing a successful PPC campaign. It is the backbone of this marketing campaign, which will be able to determine many important factors. Analytics will enable you get costs per conversion rates, unwanted visitor data, negative keyword lists, figures relating to return on investments, and such other dependable analytical data.

Your PPC campaign has got all the ingredients to prove to be a breakthrough in your online marketing and advertising campaigns, provided you play a thorough and professional game. Careful analytics will highly compensate, and being innovative will help you effectively encounter any challenge.