As its homegrown pay-per-click search ad service moved from beta test to launch overseas, MSN said it expects to begin beta testing the sponsored links stateside.

Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the MSN information services and merchant platform division, said yesterday beta tests for the service, known as adCenter, have been completed in France and Singapore — so tests in the U.S. will begin in October.

The adCenter program will allow MSN to sell sponsored links on its MSN Search results pages in the same way that Google and Yahoo already do. MSN Search presently delivers paid ads sold by Yahoo on its results pages.

“The launch of adCenter in France and Singapore is a great first step to delivering on our global vision to connect advertisers to consumers in a much more meaningful way. We’re excited by the positive feedback we have received from advertisers thus far,” Mehdi said in an opening speech at Advertising Week 2005 in New York yesterday.

AdCenter will allow advertisers to target their ads demographically, using data collected from registrations for other MSN services such as Hotmail. These could include non-personal information about age and gender, lifestyles, income, psychographics and geographic data down to the city level. The ability to target keyword ads to selected groups might make MSN’s paid search particularly interesting to search marketers: They would be able to buy specific audiences rather than simply placing bids on keywords. Neither Google nor Yahoo now offers that level of targeting.

MSN began testing adCenter in March. The company chose France and Singapore for its first test beds in order to pilot the service in both an English-speaking country and a foreign one. The two markets also offered different advertising models: sponsored links at the page header position in Singapore, and ads along the “right rail” of the page in France.

In time, Microsoft expects to deliver the MSN adCenter listings to pages outside the Microsoft content network, just as Google and Yahoo now serve ads to pages they don’t operate.

MSN did not elaborate on whether the new ads would combine with those served by Yahoo or replace them. Yahoo has a contract to serve paid search ads to MSN until mid-2006.

As its homegrown pay-per-click search ad service moved from beta test to launch overseas, MSN said it expects to begin beta testing the sponsored links stateside.

Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the MSN information services and merchant platform division, said yesterday beta tests for the service, known as adCenter, have been completed in France and Singapore — so tests in the U.S. will begin in October.

The adCenter program will allow MSN to sell sponsored links on its MSN Search results pages in the same way that Google and Yahoo already do. MSN Search presently delivers paid ads sold by Yahoo on its results pages.

“The launch of adCenter in France and Singapore is a great first step to delivering on our global vision to connect advertisers to consumers in a much more meaningful way. We’re excited by the positive feedback we have received from advertisers thus far,” Mehdi said in an opening speech at Advertising Week 2005 in New York yesterday.

AdCenter will allow advertisers to target their ads demographically, using data collected from registrations for other MSN services such as Hotmail. These could include non-personal information about age and gender, lifestyles, income, psychographics and geographic data down to the city level. The ability to target keyword ads to selected groups might make MSN’s paid search particularly interesting to search marketers: They would be able to buy specific audiences rather than simply placing bids on keywords. Neither Google nor Yahoo now offers that level of targeting.

MSN began testing adCenter in March. The company chose France and Singapore for its first test beds in order to pilot the service in both an English-speaking country and a foreign one. The two markets also offered different advertising models: sponsored links at the page header position in Singapore, and ads along the “right rail” of the page in France.

In time, Microsoft expects to deliver the MSN adCenter listings to pages outside the Microsoft content network, just as Google and Yahoo now serve ads to pages they don’t operate.

MSN did not elaborate on whether the new ads would combine with those served by Yahoo or replace them. Yahoo has a contract to serve paid search ads to MSN until mid-2006.