From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Microsoft adCenter (formerly MSN
adCenter), is the division of the Microsoft Network (MSN) responsible for
MSN's advertising services. Microsoft adCenter provides pay per click
advertisements.
History
A Microsoft adCenter promotional
graphic
Microsoft was the last of the "Big Three" search engines (Microsoft, Google and Yahoo!) to develop its own system for delivering
pay per click
(PPC) ads. Until the beginning of 2006, all of the ads displayed on
the MSN search engine were supplied by Overture (and later Yahoo!).
MSN collected a portion of the ad revenue in return for displaying
Yahoo!'s ads on its search engine.[1]
As search marketing grew, Microsoft began developing its own
system, Microsoft adCenter, for selling PPC advertisements directly
to advertisers. As the system was phased in, MSN search showed
Yahoo! and Microsoft adCenter advertising in its search results. As
of June 2006, the contract between Yahoo! and Microsoft had expired
and Microsoft is displaying only ads from adCenter.
In November 2006 Microsoft Acquired DeepMetrix, a company
situated in Gatineau, Canada, that created web-analytics software.
Microsoft has built new product AdCenter Analytics based on the
acquired technology. In October, 2007 the Beta version of Microsoft
Project Gatineau was released to a limited number of
participants.[2][3]
In May 2007, Microsoft agreed to purchase the digital marketing
solutions parent company, aQuantive, for roughly $6 billion.[4]
Microsoft acquired ScreenTonic on May 3, 2007,[5] AdECN on July
26, 2007,[6] and YaData on
February 27, 2008 and merged their technologies into adCenter.[7]
The
Technology
Similar to Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter uses
both the maximum amount an advertiser is willing to pay per click (PPC)
on their ad and the advertisement's click-through rate (CTR) to
determine how frequently an advertisement is shown. This system
encourages advertisers to write effective ads and to advertise only
on searches which are relevant to their advertisement.
Microsoft adCenter allows advertisers to target their ads by
restricting their ads to a given set of demographics and by
increasing their bids whenever the ad is seen by a user of a
certain demographic. As of November 2006, no other PPC advertising
system has a similar feature. Similarly, adCenter allows
advertisers to run their ads on specific days of the week or
certain times of day.
Microsoft adCenter provides both UI and Web service API front
end to advertisers, both are built on Microsoft .Net 2.0
framework.
References
External
links
Wikis
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