I noticed yesterday that MSN has completely altered the format of its CSV and Excel spreadsheets for mass uploading, this is something I will need to address in Keyword Organiser as soon as I get an hour spare to do some coding.

This bring me on to a quick round up of how I see the three main players in PPC advertising and how much competition I believe the underdogs will bring to the might of Google. What I will do is go over how I view each in a mini review below:

Yahoo:
When using Yahoo I get the impression that they are in PPC simply because they feel they have to be, kind of “Google is doing it so we must follow”, there seems to have been little thought put into the design of the interface, and little regard for the user in terms of making it an easy and joyful experience when performing the mundane task of entering keywords for an ad. Having to manually enter body and titles for each and every Ad is simply rediculous: Yes you can choose to use the same ad text and title for every keyword, but as all ads are manually reviewed and add the fact that unless your keyword explicitly exists in either the body or title of your ad it will most likely be declined, this makes the feature of little use.
Next we have reporting, how can the powers that be not see that reporting of keyword impressions and clicks needs to be as near to realtime as possible and that we the people paying for the service need access to that information in detail and as soon as pheasibly possible!
Overall
I think Yahoo is the Bad one of the bunch, they have nothing really going for them at all that I can see, although I understand that what little traffic they do send is supposed to convert quite well, personally I haven’t seen this trend though. The pathetic £20.00 a month minimum charge is amateurish to say the least, why would a company want to factor out the little man or put the beginner off before they even start?
Score: Sorry your score has been declined!

MSN:
Now MSN have definately got better with a little maturity, the process of putting up ads is fairly painless and at least they actually show sometime the same week you submit them! Although it can take almost a week for the page to load in busy periods and even off peak it’s very sluggish to load. I like the bulk upload feature and once you realise that IE is the browser to upload these in (due to Firefox nearly always receiving an error) everything works without too many problems. I personally preferred the old template for uploading of bulk keywords as I liked the fact I could control different prices for different keyword match types fairly painlessly - I’m not even sure of how to do this now, without manual editing!
The feature I like the most on MSN is the ability to see what my nearest competitors are bidding on to get to a certain position, it’s a smart move on their part too as I think it encourages people to push the bidding a little more than they might if they did not see that information.
Overall
I think MSN is the Ugly one of the bunch but with some work could definately turn out to be a swan, the biggest problem they have is supplying enough traffic, but the little traffic I do get from MSN seems to convert very well.
Score: Disqualifed! please learn that there is more than one browser on the market and code for them all!

Google
Obviously the heavyweight of the bunch, can supply massive amounts of traffic and has the most refined and useable interface of them all. The downside is that it’s getting increasingly more expensive to use (thus reducing profit margins even more) and add the fact that there seems to be ever more tyre kickers and / or fraud then I suspect we are paying massively over the top for the few genuine clicks that get through each day (i’m not implying that every click should convert, just that I’d like to know that the powers that be are ensuring I pay for as few fake clicks as possible). The positives of Google other than traffic and the general usability of the interface are numerous, fantastic reporting (although sometimes it takes a little too long to update clicks and impressions), the sheer ease of creating new Ads and the fact you can split test them with pure ease is just so immensely useful, plus many more…
Overall
Personally I like using Google although I wouldn’t say it’s Good it is certainly the best of the bunch and none of the rest come close, I don’t like they way the company uses its power with little regard for the people that helped get them to where they are today. Or the way in which it will happily claim that affiliate ads are of low quality and just get in the way so we will not show the ad - Well unless you pay us X amount more, then we will turn a blind eye for a while, infact until we think we can get away with asking for a bit more!
Score:8 / 10 - Start investing in ways to identify and reduce click fraud, stop penalising those that put the most money in your pockets and start helping them rather than working against them. Result Could do better!

Let me know what you think!

Mark

Busy has become my middle name this last month or so and I’m loving it, things are going well with the new business and I’m off to sign a partnership agreement this weekend and hopefully we will have time to setup a business bank account and if it all goes to plan also get to see our accountant

On another note: I’ve managed to do some coding on my Keyword Organiser program that has seen the addition of a new feature where the URL can be set within Google, I just need to do a little more testing and I will release it: Hopefully by the weekend!

Fitness: Ahhh all this sitting in front of the computer has seen me put on a few pounds, I’ve been taking my daughter to Ju Jitsu for the last few weeks and fancied doing it again myself (I did it about 8 years ago until I got quite badly injured). So I attended the adult classes last Thursday, it was obvious to them that I had done it before, so we skipped most of the basic training and went straight into throws, wrist locks and some of the more complicated break falls, well today is the first time I have been able to move without being in pain lol, but I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it and will be attending again this week!

I’m tired, exhausted infact and it’s reasonably late so I’m going to bed: Drop back soon!

Mark.