Microsoft adCenter

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


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.

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.

In May 2007, Microsoft agreed to purchase the digital marketing solutions parent company, aQuantive, for roughly $6 billion.

Microsoft acquired ScreenTonic on May 3, 2007, AdECN on July 26, 2007, and YaData on February 27, 2008 and merged their technologies into adCenter.

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.