Microsoft takes on Google AdWords

Microsoft’s MSN web portal yesterday launched its own paid-search advertising program in France, following its debut in Singapore in August. MSN AdCenter is expected to begin beta testing in the US in October.

Beta News says the program will allow “advertisers to launch highly targeted online keyword search-based campaigns, with the ability to include or exclude target customers based on geographic location, gender and age and to run ads only during certain times and days.”

With this release MSN is taking on the might of Google on its home ground by competing directly with AdWords. At present MSN contracts out a keyword-based service to Yahoo. AdCenter will eventually replace this program with a sophisticated use of customer profiling using data gathered from 9m MSN subscribers.

Danny Sullivan, Editor of SearchEngineWatch comments : “They have a sizable amount of traffic. Advertisers will want to reach that audience, and buying through MSN is going to be the only way to do that.”

Eric Hadley, Senior Director of Advertising and Marketing for MSN says :

With the competing products you buy a word. On ours you go into detailed level and see who is searching for words. You can plan a buy based on the people and say, “I’m willing to pay this much for this demographic, and I don’t want these people in the mix.”

Duncan Riley at Blog Herald says : “The new service, initially to be launched as part of MSN Search, is said to target ads in a superior way to Google by allowing advertisers to aim ads on Web search pages to users based on their sex, age or location, presumably by cookies planted in users computers as part of the process of using other MSN service such as Hotmail and Spaces.”

Update: CNET’s News.com reports : “As of June, advertisers had spent $5.8 billion to place ads online this year, a 26 percent increase compared with the first six months of 2004, according to a new report. This record spending was once again led by ads linked to Web search results.”