Diorex

As much as I hate the MSN interface, I and every other marketer I have spoken with love MSN’s quality of traffic.

It really bugs me when peoples biggest complaint is that they just want more of it.

Sit back and think for a minute why MSN converts better than Yahoo or Google…..

In my opinion it is because MSN sends traffic from 2 places(to my knowledge…). The MSN search box on the home page, and the Live Search engine. They do not show ads on 2nd or 3rd tier engines, they do not offer an ad feed like overture, they do not show ads on parked pages, and they do not show ads on sites that they do not control.

This means that the only entity that benefits from a click on an adcenter ad is MSN. When you remove the profit incentive from the click, fraud/invalid clicks are cut drastically. You still get a little bit of competitive research and other clicks that don’t/won’t convert. But, honestly, when was the last time you clicked on a competitors ad in MSN to see the landing page? What about Google or Yahoo?

So I would actually tell MSN, I love the 300-400% ROI you give me. I love paying you more per click than either Google or Yahoo. I love the awesome conversion rates. I love the higher per unit order. Please do not open your network up to anyone other than those people who use your products. I don’t want any more exposure, because you are already sending me high quality traffic that no other advertising platform can offer, that is your tactical advantage.

Recently we were approached by MSN (where we still cant get a rep for adcenter!) about buying a text link on the upper left corner of the home page.

After negotiating a bit, we got a price that I thought was too expensive, but our mantra is “We test everything”, and the senior partner liked the idea, so we created a custom landing page for a product we thought would have a broad untargetted appeal and told em we would take it for one whole day.

50,000 or so clicks, around 1% conversion, which was not so bad all thing considered.

Bottom line - we took a bath, but we saw some things that we could possibly improve on.

Ideas for next time -

1. Did we get the best possible rate? “Mark Twain - Fun Facts” ran a few days after ours, which leads me to believe that there might be remnant inventory.

2. We offer a “free” product that requires a credit card. Did the “Free” drive the traffic or would another headline have converted better?

3. What other products could we sell there that do not require payment? Name Squeeze page? Free Consultation? Lead gen?

4. Our margins on product are nice, but per unit is sub $50. What about an item with much higher per unit payouts? 1% at 5x the payout and now we are talking.

5. This product tends to be a one shot deal. What about a product that continues to pay over and over again.

For us this was an expensive investment. I think the difference between success and failure in the long run is do you decide this does not work and eliminate it from the list, or do you repackage and learn from it?

Traffic volume was nice, how can i monetize the traffic to earn money?

That should be on a bumper sticker: I wish I could monetize this traffic… or Honk if you can monetize traffic