marketing ROI As the holidays get closer I know many of you will be ramping up your PPC spend. I often hear people wondering how MSN stacks up or talking about their MSN PPC experiences in their own specific niche market. Following is a good comparison study that was just done using 4 different industries so you can get a cross reference of performance by market type. The study documents number of clicks, number of actions, conversions and cost per action. Overall the CPA on MSN was 60% lower!

One thing that stood out to me is that although we typically think of MSN delivering a lot less traffic and the study bears that out - one of the test customers got much more traffic from MSN than from YSM. The PPC advertiser was a Child Safety Site, so affiliates and merchants with family oriented products could possible do especially well on MSN this holiday season. Here’s the study from Internet Marketing Insights at KnowThis.

Choosing Between MSN and Yahoo Search Marketing “Recently we decided to test Yahoo! and MSN head-to-head… We chose four research partners, each in very different areas of business, and ran PPC ads for each of them on both Yahoo! and MSN… Across these four advertising accounts, the CPA on MSN was lower by an average of $38.24, or over 60%.”