A saving grace for adCenter would be their own version of AdWords editor which ideally would convert a Google CSV into their own format. At the very least it’d increase an SEM’s willingness to push adCente as a viable paid search engine.

1) adCenter as a platform sends chills down the spine of a PPC marketer. One touch of the “back” button and you’re thrown from your session. AdWords and Overture allows for free navigability.

2)Reports are a terror to create. They don’t exactly freely distribute API keys for large campaigns & each campaign has different internal tracking codes.

3) They simply don’t monetize traffic. 1 click of 500 impressions for a popular financial services term that they made $5 from. This was in avg pos of 1.6. They missed at least 50 bucks there.

However despite minimal traffic, a clumsy interface and questionable ad placement, the conversion rates aren’t bad (though it’s not scalable unfortunately.)

It’s this kind of flawed logic that holds so many people back in the search marketing industry.

I don’t have slow load times on Yahoo! and MSN.

“traffic details from Alexa”

There’s a universally reliable source of information for you.

This is why so many people in the search marketing community struggle.

Yahoo is #1 in traffic — but 49% of that goes to mail.yahoo.com. Only 11% goes to Yahoo search.

MSN is #2 in traffic — but 84% of that is to hotmail, search gets a minuscule 2%.

Google is #3 in traffic — and only 10% of that goes to gmail. 67% goes to search.

(traffic details from Alexa)

One way to win the search engine competition — don’t distract your traffic.

Somewhere there may be a free e-mail site with a similar article in which MSN looks like the winner. But they’re still losing in search.

Microsoft has successfully branded a new search service (live.com) in less than a year, to the point where that new search service received approximately 2/3 of the traffic that Google did in December.

Simply comparing the number of queries made doesn’t tell you anything useful, although it strongly implies that people find what they are looking for on Yahoo! and Live in about one quarter of the time it takes them to find whatever they want on Google.

Why is that?

You have 100 million people searching on Yahoo!, 100 million people search on Google, and 70 million people searching on Live.

Google’s market share — in terms of users served — is not nearly as large as these reports make it out to be.