The technology empire prepares to take on Yahoo and Google in the search advertising market.
With billions of dollars just waiting to be grabbed, Microsoft will unveil its advertising platform today in France and Singapore. The New York Times notes the MSN Search service had featured advertising sold by Yahoo’s Overture unit.
MSN will offer a test of the paid search service in the US in October. The Times quotes search engine expert Danny Sullivan as seeing serious potential for MSN offering advertising with the paid search model:
“They definitely have a market because they have the traffic,” said Danny Sullivan, the editor of the Web publication Search Engine Watch, of MSN’s search business. “Search marketers can’t seem to get enough traffic. I don’t know anyone who is not going to try MSN.”
Microsoft touted numerous features of its paid search service in a statement today:
• Keyword Selection allows advertisers to indicate whom they want to reach based on geographic location, gender, age range, time of day and day of week, and suggests keywords based on the desired audience.
• Site Analyzer assists advertisers by suggesting keywords based on the content of their Web site, rather than on another keyword.
• Audience Profiler provides advertisers with an expected profile of those customers who are most likely to search for specific keywords.
• Cost Estimator helps advertisers remain within their budget by estimating rank, traffic and cost per month per keyword.
• Campaign Optimization allows advertisers to respond quickly and decisively throughout the campaign to easily refine budget allocations and keywords, as well as apply targeting filters such as geographic, demographic and dayparting.
• Post Sales Audience Intelligence & Reporting provides advertisers with detailed reports on campaign performance and audiences reached including click-through rate, estimated position and spending levels.
Microsoft has lagged behind in the search engine field, a delay that has yielded the high ground in branding to Google. Bill Gates has referred to Google as being more like Microsoft than any other competitor they’ve faced.
The company was behind in recognizing the appeal of the World Wide Web as well. Netscape once owned the browser market, but ceded that to Internet Explorer once Microsoft began developing that browser and including it with the Windows operating system.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
