Recently, Yahoo and Msn had formed a search alliance in providing their search services. With this search alliance, you can leverage on it to drive more traffic to your website through their paid advertisements.

There are times where advertising in Google Adwords are more expensive than Yahoo and Msn and it is good then to leverage on Yahoo and Msn search to drive traffic.

In the past, I’ve made some money by driving traffic via MSN to a CPA program because the cost for advertising in MSN is low. But as competition enters the game, the clicks get more expensive.

In this tutorial, I’ll teach you how to set-up an ad in MSN adCenter;

First, go to https://adcenter.microsoft.com/

Then, log-in and create your first campaign:

In the first page, you’ll come across with a lot of options like:

• Campaign settings – This is where you enter your Campaign Name and Local Timezone.
• Campaign budget settings
  • Campaign Budget – Daily and monthly budget options. Youu can set either a daily or a monthly campaign budget. The budget is the amount you want to spend for your online campaign. You can change the budget amount at any time. If you don’t expect to adjust your campaign budget frequently, select the per month option. However, if you want to change your budget throughout the month, for example, to adjust for heavier traffic during a promotion, select the per day option.
  • Spend Settings
    • Divide budget across the month
    • Spend budget until depleted
• Campaign targeting – Use the targeting options in Microsoft adCenter to focus on specific potential customers, which can increase the chances that they’ll see your ads.
  • Target customers by location – When you target by location (also known as geotargeting), your ads will be displayed to potential customers in specific countries/regions, states/provinces, metro areas, or cities within your market.
  • Target customer by device – When you target by device, your ads will be displayed only to potential customers who are viewing your ad with a specific device, such as a smartphone, laptop, or desktop computer.



• Campaign exclusions – Exclude specific websites, webpages, keywords (called negative keywords), or search partners from your advertising campaigns.
  • Negative keywords
• Ad group settings
  • Ad group name (128 characters maximum)
  • Distribute your ads by language and market – When you create a new ad group, you will select the language that the ads are written in, and the market or set of websites through which the ads are distributed. For example, select English – UK if your ads are written in British English and should be displayed to people who search on sites like msn.co.uk. Select French – France if your ads are written in French and should be displayed to people who search on sites like fr.msn.com.

When you click on Next, you’ll see the 2nd page:

Click on Create text ad then a pop-up screen will appear, asking you to enter details for your text ad like Ad title, Ad text, Display URL, Destination URL and your Text Ad preview (found in the right box):

After entering all the details, click on Save. Now, your newly placed text ad will appear on the list.

Clicking on next will bring you to the 3rd page, which is keywords.

• Choose keywords – Keywords are the words and phrases that your potential customers use when they search online for products and services. To create a list of quality keywords, begin with those words that are most relevant to the products, services, and information offered on your website. You can then use the keyword research tool to find and add variations of those words.
• Keyword research tools
  • Find keywords containing a word or phrase
  • Search a website for keywords
  • Search the destination URLs of your ads

Click on “Add to keyword list” and the keywords will be found below:

Click on “Next” to get to the 4th screen which is “Pricing”

• Set your campaign budget – Your budget is the maximum amount you will spend for this online campaign. This budget covers all of the ad groups in a campaign, not just this one.
  • Estimated spend (USD) – This monthly estimate is based on your bids. Actual costs depend on ad performance.
  • Campaign budget (USD) – Same as described in the first part.
  • Spend settings
    • Divide budget across the month
    • Spend budget until depleted
    • Set daily budget cap
• Bid on keywords - With cost-per-click (CPC) bids, you set the maximum amount you are willing to pay each time someone clicks your ad. With cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) bids, you set the maximum amount you’ll pay for each 1000 times your ad is displayed. If, however, you use incremental bidding to target your ads to a specific audience, your actual cost could be more.
  • Default bid (max. CPC) – A default bid will automatically apply to all of your keywords unless you set separate bids for individual keywords. If you have both content and search ads, you can set separate default bids for each.

To get to the 5th page which is Review Data (where you can have a look at the summary of the ad you created), you have to click on the “Next” button:

Click on “Finish”. Then you’ll be brought back to the “Campaign” page where you’ll find the newly created campaign.

In my opinion, the 5-page set-up of MSN adCenter is easier, compared to that of Google’s. It is organized in such a way that users will find it easier to create and edit their ads because each page or step is arranged accordingly.

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Tagged as: MSN, Msn adcenter, pay per click, PPC