It’s been a long time coming since I posted something people found useful. To tell you the truth, I lost my mojo. The network has grown at a phenomenal rate over the last year and thru it all, I truly lost all motivation to write. Something happened the other day. Something in me just clicked and I vowed to get back up, dust myself off and ultimately quit being such a puss.
For all of you MSN Adcenter/Bing publishers who use this traffic source, I dedicate this post to you. If you are not currently using this platform to buy traffic from, please sit back and enjoy the show. It’s about to get split wide-the-f#ck open.
DISCLAIMER: The examples used in this post are for example only. I think you can appreciate since I manage about 500+ publishers businesses now, I cannot reveal actual keywords. Still, if you give what I say some thought and then manage to actually put some effort into it, I’ll bet making money with MSN/Bing is a helleva lot less stressful than Yahoo or Google.
Relevance IS NOT Key – When I speak about relevance, I would like to reiterate something that I had my MSN Account Manager specifically relay to me last year. I was specifically told to keyword stuff my landers. Pretty broad vision dont you think? This still holds true today even.
Keywords, Keywords, Keywords.
Having the keywords on your page is vital. If you are an automated lander maker then this is simple. Go specifically with one keyword per landing page. You can hardly go wrong there. However, with working with C2M you are generally in the larger markets because that is where we are accustomed to operating and can help you more. We dont piddle around in “niche marketing” and all that jive. We deal specifically in large markets where the competition is fierce. We do this because there is a ton of money there. So with that said, keywords are the driving force on getting ads approved.
Stay away from url targeting, mispelled keywords?
This next part might sound confusing, because frankly, it is. A lot of publishers like to bid on high traffic urls and even misspelled keywords. One thing I have realized over the years is the MSN Bots are part retarded. What happens is that the bot goes to your page and determines the relevance. The bot is not much for caring on domain urls, extensions or expansion phrasing. If you are going to do this, dont risk the whole adgroup not getting approved. Do each one separately.
Stay away from the word free – I cannot stress this enough. While C2M is predominately rebill and CC type offers, I have had my fair share of help optimizing hundreds (probably close to a thousand) campaigns on MSN. Trust when I say, do not use the word FREE anywhere. If you are getting away with that, by all means congratulations but I assure you from the banning of grants and acai, publishers have cut their own throats and the industry itself down to not being able to advertise those offers all because they cant leave out a simple word. Sooner or later, you are going to get the ax advertising with the word free if your offers are not.
MSN doesnt really care for most rebill or even email submit type offers. If the consumer is fooled from the lander all the way to the offer, MSN does pick up on this. So be careful of your wording.
Finally, A Word On Volume – This is really the kicker on MSN/Bing. If you do managed to get stuff approved and thru, now you have the low volume thing to worry about. With MSN, try going a little broader. If you are advertising in the weight loss market let me give you a few examples:
At the time of this writing, I saw a single competitor. Pretty cheap bids on weight loss keywords when you are the only advertiser right? Now the job is took take the knowledge and get started.
How about attacking keywords in the weight loss market that is predominantly women such as:
Do you know according to the Adwords External Keyword Tool that the word “bikini” is searched approximately 16,600,000 times monthly? Did you also know that I saw ZERO creativeness for a weightloss ad regarding this keyword in MSN/Bing? A word like that is worth testing when understanding that the average percentage (60%) of US women are obese. Not overweight, OBESE.
Let’s review:
- Keyword stuff the page – It’s encourage by them (YAY)
- Create specific pages for domain url bidding and expansion type phrases
- Dont mislead consumers
- Tackle high volume keywords in the market that no other advertiser is paying attention to.
- 5. Attack related keywords that a market is filled with predominatly and test keywords relating.
Happy Hunting 
Comments (5)
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Excellent write up. Thanks for the Adcenter tips!
Kris
Great info. It’s wonderful when a network is happy to let their PAID advertisers spam. That’s the way it SHOULD be!
Great post. Got a quick question though. I’ve set up a campaign on adcenter, 1 advertiser on this keyword, fairly broad, all keywords are active (and have been for a couple days now) but I don’t show up for the keyword, zero impressions, etc. I’m only bidding 10c, but then again, there is only 1 other advertiser.
Any ideas whats up?
One of the BEST aff. marketing posts I’ve read all year Ruck. Good stuff! I’m going to OWN MSN now (o:
This was information I could not find anywhere else and since I was trying to direct link my MSN ads were taking FOREVER to get approved. Now I know why. I was using 1000+ keywords and they have few keywords on the LP…lol