Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

Microsoft AdCenter converts a lot better than Google and Yahoo, although you will see significantly less hits. Still, the quality of traffic is much higher, so for advertisers with a small budget, Microsoft Adcenter seems to be the answer.

I agree that adCenter typically has a higher conversion rate than Google and Yahoo but I attribute this to less competition (from competitors running ads), not a higher quality of traffic.

Along with this is that your ROI will typically also be higher than G and Y.

However, the problem, and it is a big one, is I've found time and time again with accounts across a wide range of industries is that the traffic as measured by impressions is so low, that you can't get enough conversions to make "enough" revenue with adCenter alone.

This is one reason why there is less advertiser competition - it still takes time to manage the campaigns and for some people it isn't worth it.

Very budget friendly, no doubt, but not revenue friendly.

So my suggestion would be to go ahead and start with adCenter but have realistic low expectations for it and learn what keywords, ads, copy, landing pages - all the usual stuff -convert best and then start a migration to Google and/or Yahoo.

Who knows, you might be pleasantly surprised and actually exceed your expectations!

As a side note, I do find the adCenter dashboard quite nice to work with, they have definitely put some thought and time into it and have made a lot of improvements.

Not as good as Google by any means, but much more so than Yahoo.

OKay, I would give some really simple but effective advice about working with Adcenter. I have worked briefly for their editorial team, which is responsible for manually screening each and every advert thats submitted to them.
So, one thing must be clear:-they manually screen every submitted advert, which is not the case with Google. Secondly, they are VERY rigid on relevancy of your ad/keywords and the landing page. Hence their high conversion rate.
Third, they are also very adamant about grammer and typo. With Google you can get away with anything, not with Adcenter.
So simply follow these rules and yoyu'd have a highly targeted stream of traffic.