If it is, how would you react? Would you cut Google spend, double your PPC budget, cut your Overture or SiteMatch (Xchange) budget, simply become overloaded with options, data, and tracking systems and not know what to do?
If something like that did launch pre-Google IPO, how would it affect Google & the IPO, or would it?
What if MSN does do this and AOL decides to go search alone and replace the Google results, then what happens? Where do the ad dollars flow?
Which means I'd set up an account with it to test it's ROI, abilities, and conversions. I would not consider it a 'necessary ppc' until it proved itself.
I wouldn't touch the other budgets, as they are making money as they are. IF I had to touch one, it would be Overture as presumebly you could just reallocate the unused MSN budget.
What would be interesting is to see how much my Overture budget dropped if MSN launched such a thing. I just keep thinking of LS and how MSN dropping them made my LS budget go up, and then manually set to $0.
Other than that, it's just another entry in the PPC engines spreadsheet. Below overture and above findwhat. Or maybe below overture US and above overture UK..
MS might be waiting for google to settle the overture patent issues first, however..
It's quite possible that AOL and MSN don't really pay anything to use google and overture. Perhaps Google and overture are just glad to give away free because it attracts AdWords/Overture customers..
Anyways, I'd be happy to see less consolidation and more confusion in this industry. :)
I am sure we can be confident of MSN finding ways to take every penny they can get though!
For us it also depends on how easy it is to setup and maintain campaigns. This is one reason why we prefer adwords over overture as the management of an overture campaign is much more cumbersome than Adwords. If the UI sucks (which would be no surpise from microsoft) We'll just use MSN as we do with overture we run the proven keywords and ad copy on it that we have tested with Adwords.
Another big question is how will overture and Google react. I do not expect major price wars but we may get things we have always wanted from Adwords (like more control over the search partners and content targetting).
An exact clone? That is, would MSN ad positioning depend on CTR x CPC factor? I would be doubly excited if MSN comes up the AdWords system.
>>> Where do the ad dollars flow?
The ad dollars go where there are conversions.
traffic converts lovely jubbly, sp my money would be there.
as for other implications, who knows.
Shak
Budgets - as they are - would then have to be split between existing campaigns and any new platforms. If, however, this speculated model was anything like Overture I'd look to maximise solely via Google.
Syzygy
From experience I know that a lot of B2C stuff on MSN (having had experience with CPM, tennancy and revenue share deals with them before) converts like no other traffic.
In terms of where the money would come from - it would first come from the profits of other PPC campaigns, then it would pay for itself (otherwise it wouldn't be running...).
