Has Anyone else Noticed an Increase in the MSN traffic?

[Turkish]

We are based in the UK and have been using MSN Adcenter since its formation back in the summer. However, initially the site was struggling to spend the allocated budgets to each campaign - we have 10 campaigns.

Recently, we have noticed that the advertising platform (MSN) has managed to spend the whole monthly budgets of the majority of the campaigns within 2 and a half weeks. ( We were using the "Spend Budget until depleted" option due to the lack of spending). I have asked Adcenter staff whre the sudden increase in traffic has come from and they couldnt really give me an answer although they did assure me that they are still only showing ads on MSN (Windows Live).

Has anyone else noticed that they are now spending the budgets much more easily?

All answers appreciated...

[teenwolf]

I have noticed that, too. From what I can tell, the traffic seems legit traffic coming from live.com.

[briggidere]

receptional - do you have any comments on this one.

It is definately strange that their inventory has gone up all of a sudden without announcing any major changes. We are not all of a sudden on the content network either. That option isn't available to us.

have they done any advertising to get more people onto their search pages to get this increase? I havn't noticed anything.

Briggidere

[mitchy231]

Well as of yesterday, MSN switched to a beta site enabling 'Content match.' Obviously using a lot more of their affiliates.

[Receptional]

I'm in the UK - so my traffic is mostly UK centric and may be different to yours. I didn't look today - but I'll get back to you tomorrow.

[added]Ah! I see you are on the UK too! I'll CERTAINLY check and get back to you![/added] :)

[edited by: Receptional at 5:52 pm (utc) on Jan. 29, 2007]

[Receptional]

It's morning now and apart from one of our accounts being on pause for no discernable reason (yeh... they are still looking into it... come ON Microsoft!) we are piling on the bids so fast that we are experiencing really dramatic increases in volumes but can't directly attribute this to a change in the query share.

That said, we are now starting to spend our budgets on campaigns already running, which we weren't before.

IE7 was recently turned into a security update for earlier versions of IE and I would offer the theory that people are downloading IE7 and accepting the offer of using Live Search as their browser search box. To be fair to Microsoft (which I think is generous given one of my accounts is on pause) this is an OPT IN preference - so people have to check the box and are also free to choose other engines. Nevertheless, twenty million people in the UK upgrading is bound to have some affect on query share.

BRING IT ON!