Jake it’s not working — trust us on this
July 21, 2008
One of our favorite reads is B|NET (C|Net spinoff) that focuses on various industries, the area of course we like spending time on is the Advertising Agency section of course. Jake published this article “Microsoft’s Cashback Ad Plan Is (Maybe) Working” Trust us Jake.. it’s not (and for Jake’s defense.. he noted the figures are highly confusing)…
If anything the boost looks like 100% growth.. but it’s an additional 10 people that logged in for a futile attempt to boost their sales to their online store.
Remember, MSN is trying to be a search engine. Instead what they did was offer a better deal for advertisers on their non-trafficked site. That didn’t improve search however… it offered a better deal for advertisers to push out ‘free ads’ on a search engine that no one uses because the results are filled with spam and non-expected results show up.
You can’t make money from no traffic … and very few people uses MSN as their default search when compared to Google.
For a real world example, we are ranked equally in virtually the same spot in MSN and Google for a host of terms. Yet the vast majority of traffic comes from Google… every so often we get a visitor from MSN… but by no means is it noteworthy… we get more traffic from a blogroll link on B|Net than MSN…
We should know their mentality at Microsoft, I personally interviewed there to help ‘fix the problem’…
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Ha, I’m well aware of the shortcomings of MS’s cashback scheme. Still, it’s worth watching what Nielsen and ComScore report in the next month. My gut feeling is, yeah, the plan’s a wash, but its entirely possible that people will be drawn by the lure of cheaper stuff. Stranger things have happened.