Microsoft Office Live (http://www.officelive.com) today announced that it is adding Ask Sponsored Listings (http://sponsoredlistings.ask.com) to its adManager Beta search advertising service. adManager enables small businesses to purchase and manage search-based keyword advertising easily and affordably directly from the Microsoft Office Live platform. Ask Sponsored Listings joins the MSN network and Windows Windows Live Search as distribution sources for Microsoft Office Live customers’ search ads.Ask Sponsored Listings(ASL) is an automated, open-auction system that allows search marketers to purchase, manage and optimize pay-per-click and contextual advertising campaigns on the ASL publisher network, including Ask.com.

As more consumers are making purchase decisions online, search marketing has emerged as a $15.8 billion global industry, and experts expect it to grow to $44.5 billion over the next five years. Search is also the second most commonly used application on the Web, with 550 million searches daily in the United States, according to Piper Jaffray & Co.* Local search is also catching on as more businesses want to be able to target their ads to a specific region; in 2006, local search accounted for approximately 15 percent of total online ad spending.** adManager is heeding these trends by offering small businesses a solution to develop a national or locally targeted search-engine advertising campaign in no time that can be managed across multiple search engines.

We are very excited about the integration of Ask Sponsored Listings, as this provides more options for our small businesses to market their companies and attract new customers, said Baris Cetinok, director of product management and marketing for Microsoft Office Live. Adding Ask Sponsored Listings to our adManager service gets us one step closer to our goal of providing small businesses with an all-inclusive search engine marketing service.

Cetinok continued, Many small businesses feel that search engine marketing is a complicated and expensive process, and we want to demonstrate to our customers, especially those without a lot of time or budget, that pay-per-click advertising on adManager can be simple and affordable. adManager will help our small businesses promote their companies to the millions out there using the Internet to search for products and services.

James Speer, general manager of search marketing at IAC Advertising Solutions, said, The Ask Sponsored Listings search advertising network reaches over 59 million monthly unique users. The integration of Ask Sponsored Listings with Microsoft Office Live makes it easy for marketers to extend their pay-per-click ad campaigns to our publisher network.

Search ads are text-based ads displayed on a search results page. They look very similar to search results displayed in the main body of the page; however, they are labeled as advertisements. To start the search engine marketing process, businesses can bid on keywords related to their services and products; their ad then has the potential of appearing when customers submit keyword searches on the Internet. Advertisers are charged only when their ad is clicked, which makes search advertising highly efficient.

adManager facilitates the pay-per-click advertising process for small businesses. Once a small business sets up an account with adManager, it can immediately select keywords to create its ads and set its bid amounts. adManager will work within the company’s budget, as well as target the campaign at the local or national level. In addition, the service will show results through detailed reports that describe which keywords are driving customers to the advertiser’s Web site.