MSN – The best and the worst Search Engine! - Microsoft adCenter

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MSN – The best and the worst Search Engine!

November 7th, 2007 by Nick

The first of the month has rolled around quickly again and here at Click Consult that means reports day!

We provide all our clients with in depth reports on a monthly basis. It's a great way of keeping the client up to date and a good way to check on our own work, but it's not a day I look forward to.

The main trial I face is the adcenter. Microsoft have invested heavily and much like all of Microsoft products, it is a work in progress. More updates were added last weekend and more will follow I’m sure.

The crux of the situation is usability. Again there can be some parallels drawn across all Microsoft products. The interface looks great, graphs appear along side reports, tables fade in and out of view. All this beauty has come at a cost. While Microsoft have invested heavily in the look and feel perhaps they should have gone down the more functional route first then updated the look.

Generating a report in MSN takes twice as long as any other search engine. Even Yahoo have got a reasonably quick updating interface. When those reports come the data is well presented and clear, but missing the totals, a pretty simple thing to solve in Excel, but that only makes it more annoying that I use a Microsoft program to fix what could be done in the interface already!

For all the interface weaknesses the final nail in the coffin is the results… They are great! I advise all my clients to use Microsoft. The traffic volume is easier to manage for smaller budgets and the potential conversion rates are far higher than the other engines. Microsoft were recently touting their overall conversion rate for all clicks from Live search at 5.4%! This for me, means I have to spend more time using the most frustrating search engine of all.

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