Search Engine Pay-Per-Click: AdWords VS adCenter

By far the most popular, Adwords certainly has the biggest market share and is seen by the most eyes. The entire system is easy to use, and there are plenty of opportunities to customize your ads and their placement to maximize your conversion rates. 

The most important thing to remember with Google Adwords is that its cost pivots on your quality score, which can be quite a pain in the backside. The lower your score, the more it costs and the harder it is to be seen. Once you’ve got a good quality score, however, you can easily own the space in terms of advertising.

If you want to learn more about quality score, and how to improve it, try some of these excellent resources:

What Is the AdWords Quality Score and How Is It Calculated? — Right from the horse’s mouth. Google has a huge database filled with information on quality score and the entire AdWords process.

Improve Your Quality Score: Free Toolkit — This toolkit from Wordstream includes a webinar, worksheet and other goodies you can use to not only learn about quality score, but improve the quality score of your own ads.

Inside Google AdWords’ Quality Score — A massive, massive handbook from PPC Hero that includes pretty much everything and anything that may and may not affect your quality score. It’s point form and cuts out the crap.

MSN, and therefore MSN adCenter ads, may have less of a market share, but for many people, this is a huge advantage. Fewer competitors means it’s easier to get to the top of the heap. As a result, many people feel it has a higher conversion rate, and they certainly have the stats to back it up. I won’t make this sweeping generalization, however, because I feel strongly that this really depends on your entire campaign, website, and business. (To get an idea of which one may convert better, look at your analytics to see which search engine has the best conversion rates and where users from each search engine are going.) 

I really enjoy the various tools adCenter provides and find it to be a more customer-oriented system. That being said, it is still a fair bit more difficult to use. You’ll find it takes a while to get familiar with their system.

To score your ads, MSN currently takes your Click-Thru-Rate (CTR), bid, and position. MSN has also recently adopted its own quality score that you’ll want to watch out for.

Here are a few resources for using the MSN adCenter and getting the best conversion rates on your ads:

MSN’s Editorial Guidelines — What you need to know about creating a great ad for the MSN network.

How To Set Up an MSN adCenter Ad — A good going through of the basics. If it’s you’re first time using the system, you might find this walk-through helpful.

SMB PPC Ad Tips — A video interview filled with great tips. These guys know what they’re talking about.

3 adCenter Optimization Tips — From Search Engine Watch, this one has three tips not usually mentioned in posts for the MSN system. Microsoft’s TechNet also has a list of 10 tips to have a gander at.

Finally, if you want to get a direct comparison of AdWords and adCenter, SageRock put together a brilliant set of charts you might want to have a look at. Keep in mind that things are constantly changing, so if there’s something vital to your search campaign, check with the PPC Center before making a final decision.