MSN Pilot Fixes YSM Feed Problems

October 22, 2005

MSN’s pilot program is suppose to show, for any given keyword, MSN results 25% of the time and Yahoo Search Marketing results 75% of the time.

MSN was having issues with it’s Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM, formerly Overture) feed, and MSN pilot advertisers that had the same keyword in both programs only received MSN exposure for a brief period of time.

If you had a keyword on Overture, and not on MSN, then your listings were displaying as normal. The error only occurred if a keyword appeared in both PPC engines.

This was making it so that several advertisers were receiving less exposure with the pilot program than they would normally receive.

As MSN only accounts for roughly 14% of all searches, some advertisers didn’t see a huge drop in impressions, however, other’s saw a large drop in impressions (presumably B2B businesses which MSN has a decent query share).

The latest checks showed MSN had fixed the display issues and showing both YSM & MSN results as expected.

Related Information:

« 1000 Post Milestones

Display Spending Boosted for Local Sites »

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, MSN PPC - adCenter