Briefs

ClickZ News, By Kevin Newcomb | September 29, 2006

While there's certainly room to grow its traffic, Microsoft adCenter is becoming a favorite among search engine marketers.

A group of advertisers assembled for a roundtable discussion in Microsoft's New York headquarters this week said they were happy with the results they've seen from adCenter so far, but all agreed they'd like to get more traffic, as long as the returns do not go down.

"We're finding the traffic is very good traffic. It's consistently performing in a way that allows us to increase our spend in search," said David Hughes, CEO of The Search Agency. Hughes said that traffic is still not at the level of other search engines, but that his clients have seen as much as 400 percent growth in traffic on their campaigns since adCenter launched fully in May.

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Adding demographic, geographic, and psychographic targeting, as Microsoft has done with adCenter, adds a level of sophistication that many marketers have been clamoring to take advantage of, Hughes said. Where Google, and soon Yahoo, will effectively punish marketers for crafting an ad that is not meant to be clicked on by much of the audience, Microsoft's targeting allows the non-targeted audience to be removed from the equation, so the ad's performance goes up and is not dropped in the results.

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