ExpertAdWords

Advertisers using MSN AdCenter should be aware of an error that could be scaring away your business.

The AdCenter conversion code used to track sales from MSN Live creates the above error message when viewed in Mozilla Firefox. MSN knows about the error and as of yet has refused to create a patch that would prevent the error message from occurring.

If you are using the conversion code to track purchases, more than likely, the error message will be little more than an inconvenience for your customers. But, if the Site owner is tracking actions such as an email signup, the MSN message could confuse the consumer and the site may lose integrity because most users won’t realize that the error cannot be fixed by the website administrator.

I also believe that error is interfering with Google conversion verification. Personally, I’m stripping it out of my sites and may replace it later when MSN has a patch.

MSN’s AdLab contains demos for all new Microsoft search and advertising technology. Here is a brief outline of what is currently available:

Demographic Prediction: predict a persons age, gender, and other demographic data by their online behavior. This will be really cool for bidding to your targeted audience when all search engines use demographic data.

Sensitive Webpage Detecting: Detects whether a webpage contains sensitive data.

Video Hyperlink: Creates a dynamic hyperlink over online video that can be clicked on by the user. This is sweet. I think eventually this will be it’s own channel and nearly as influencial as SEM.

Social Video: Adds and shares comments on video frames. Another cool tool to add value to video, which, we will then advertise on.
Content Categorization: Classifies websites into categories. I think people will eventually use this for advertising on a range of site-targeted websites.

Search Funnel: Analyze and visualize user search sequences in the form of a funnel. Bid on keywords near the end of the funnel to increase ROI.

Keyword Forecast: Forecasts the impressions and predicts demographic data using one or more search terms. I think I would use this for product development and deciding if I should enter a market.

Seasonal Keyword Forecast: Forecasts the seasonal patterns of search queries. This would be perfect for making proactive changes to your bids based on predicted increases and decreases in traffic.

Keyword Mutilation Detection: Detect frequent misspellings or alternative spellings of the same keyword in search query logs. A perfect tool for expanding keyword lists. This would be perfect for expanding into really competitive markets.

Search Result Clustering: Cluster a set of documents, such as search results, into semantically related groups in real time.

Keyword Group Detection: Given a word or phrase, find a set of similar words. Looks like you could use this to create AdGroups/Orders.

Detecting Online Commercial Intention: Predicts the intention of the user to purchase based on search queries and recently visited pages. Another great tool for bidding.

I noticed that MSN used a similar setup for suggesting related links that Yahoo uses.

I typed in Gout into the search bar and received a list of additional searches that MSN provides to help users.

You can use the same method I wrote about in Yahoo Link Network to bid on the exact match to the keywords and dominate the search result ads.