Sponsored links for law firms: MSN AdCenter in the works

Sponsored links on Google and Yahoo have proved fruitful for lawyers. Generally, they’ll work better for lawyers doing personal plight and small business work, e.g., personal injury, family law, criminal defense, real estate and the like.

So far Microsoft’s MSN has used Yahoo’s Overture sponsored links system for MSN’s sponsored links. But there’s big money in Internet advertising. So Microsoft has been developing it’s own system for MSN. Should be out soon.

This is good news for lawyers. MSN’s users are less sophisticated Internet users than users of Google. 75% of Google users distrust sponsored links, they’re looking at the organic search results, not the paid for ones. However, MSN users are just the opposite, 75% go to sponsored links.

What do people think of MSN AdCenter (in testing)?

Search Engine Roundtable culled some of the latest comments about MSN’s AdCenter at WebmasterWorld.

• Clean & Easy to Understand User Interface; Similar to Google AdWords.
• Ability to manage several campaigns under one username, like the Google Client Center.
• Advanced & Cool Metrics; ‘view demand for each KW/KP, but then also break each of those into charts containing traffic trends (time), gender trends (M/F), and geographic stats (LA, San Diego, Paris, etc).’
• Budget Estimator (Price Estimator) can be better but it is usable.
• Reports are awesome; ‘create reports on all types of data including dates, performance, targeting, and the neatest of all – by time ranges (AM/PM style!).’
• Time Based Ad Delivery Options; ‘IE: Serve this ad for the following keywords in the ‘morning’ only please.’
• Cost to set up an account, about $5 service fee, then PPC fees onward.
• $0.10 CPC minimum, but for some reasons, $0.05 bids can get through.
• Bidding works based on keyword phrase and the ad. You basically set a price by keyword phrase and ad. In addition, you can opt to increase your bid to reach a targeted audience, through ‘targeted bidding,’ more often.
• ‘Targeted Bidding’ is cool! It allows you to target based on ‘(1) Users in a specific geographic location (2) Users searching on specific days of the week or during a specific part of the day (3) Users of a specific gender or age.’

Though MSN traffic is much less than Google, MSN sponsored links may be a good buy when lawyers focus on a niche area of law and locale.