Building eCommerce

One of the fastest ways to begin getting traffic to a new ecommerce website is by using PPC (pay-per-click) advertising. One huge advantage is that your visitors have self-selected themselves by clicking on an advertisement. If the ad accurately reflects the content/product/etc on your ecommerce site, then you have targeted traffic that is - at least - somewhat interested in what you’re offering.

Sounds pretty good, right? Done correctly it is. Do it wrong and you get poor faster than a tourist waving a fistful of dollars in a border town. A poorly written ad, over-priced, inappropriate or poorly selected and therefore untargeted keywords, and you can get a ton of traffic, make no sales and receive a truly awesome bill.

There are, currently, only two first tier pay-per-click programs - Google’s AdWords and Overture (now a part of Yahoo). However, something is finally happening at MSN. They plan to start up their own PPC advertising network this year - starting in Singapore and France. I’ve just picked up and added two articles by Joe Walsh on the debut and the potential problems he sees with the program as described so far. You can read the articles here:

MSN PPC Advertising Network Finally Debuts

MSN PPC Advertising Behavioral and Demographic Targeting: Killer App. or Achilles’ Heel?

Some of the changes that have been going on at Google could well be an attempt to stay ahead of the curve and make it harder for MSN to take a significant share of the extremely lucrative PPC market.

The concerns that Joe talks about regarding privacy and the huge amount of data MSN has in various places on millions of surfers could well force MSN into a reworking of the program along lines more similar to existing PPC programs. Though if you look at the proliferation of services from Google and Yahoo, they just might start using all that data they also have to do behavioral and demographic targeting after letting MSN take the initial heat.

While behavioral targeting sounds like a real plus for the advertiser, it may not be as popular with all of us targets. And the alleged privacy protections provided by MS services such as HotMail and the ones you can only access using a .Net passport are likely to get a lot of attention.

Do you think maybe Bill wants to be everybody’s big brother?