First Impressions

As a seasoned Ad Words obsessive, I've been eagerly awaiting the launch of Microsoft's Ad Words rival... Ad Center. Why the anticipation? Ad Center rankings are based on a quality score much like Google. In really simple terms this means that if you're smart and produce great ad copy, great keywords and split test you can get your clicks cheaper than your competitors. Both Yahoo and Miva base thier rankings on a simply "the more you pay the higher you rank" method.

So after having played with Ad Center for an hour or so what are my first impressions?

Ad Center features some very cool functionality that puts even Google in the shade. I guess this is why Google have released so much functionality over the past few months just to try and fend off what they knew was coming in Ad Center.

Dynamic Text
This is VERY cool! Google Ad Words allows you to add whatever keyword the user types into the headline fo your ad using the {keyword} paramater. This saves so much time and helps ensure your ad is relevant. Ad Center takes this idea and improves on it by adding more flexibility and more parameters and you can add them to all lines in your ad copy!

Incremental Bidding
Now you can bid different pricing depending on who sees the ad!!! If you sell a product aimed primarily at women under 30 years old you can choose to pay more (and get higher ranking) only for users in this target group. Men may well buy your product as a gift but the conversion ratio may be less and so you'll likely want to bid a little less for ads shown to men, now you can!

Research
Ad Center's keyword research tool is also pretty nifty. Ad Centers big selling point is that it uses info about it's users gleaned from profiles in MSN etc to allow advertisers to target certain individual user types. The Ad CEnter research tool not only allows you to find keywords but also shows you a history of the amount of traffic that keyword has generated, what the male/female ratio is for users who enter that keyword and thier geographical location!

AS I become more accustomed to these options I'll go through them in depth.