Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) face new competition from Microsoft's newly released PPC program, MSN AdCenter.

Currently, MSN displays search ads from Yahoo! Search Marketing, through a contract that runs until July 2006. The new technology from Microsoft will take much time to be implemented. In the first phase — that should start somewhere before mid-August this year — MSN AdCenter will be tested in France and Singapore.

Advertisers love the PPC system rather than others because it's cheaper and more targeted; they only pay when their ads get clicks. However, when a third major competitor turns up, one can only hope that cost per click (CPC) gets cheaper, thus lowering the advertising costs.

As to what the new service features, the competition promises to be tough: geographic location, gender, age group, lifestyle segment and time of day, all these data to be accessed even before the advertisers place their ads. Eric Hadley, senior director of advertising and marketing for MSN, says the new platform is meant to help users drive ROI and effective results from a search campaign beyond just knowing if somebody clicked on it, but also knowing if someone is likely to click on it .

Search engine advertisers can't wait to see their keyword based campaigns become even more targeted. However, they'll have to wait a little bit longer, because there's no serious encouragement that the full-scale deployment of AdCenter will be possible before the end of this year.