LiveSide - News blog : live search cashback

On the eve of Kumo, is Live Search better than you think?

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 18 May 2009 16:53:00 GMT

Kumo, the for now name of a newly rebranded Microsoft Live Search, should be upon us soon. Kumo has been in corporate wide internal testing at Microsoft since early March (oops added the time frame), and at least parts of what appears to be a new UI have been resurfacing. We don’t have the home page changes here, but in searching for some news on Sunday night’s LA earthquake, we did run across one of the purported new features of “Kumo”, called “Best match”:

Note the smaller search box contained within the best match, for searching within the best match web page. Vanessa Fox had spotted Best match back in March, but there was no “search within” box back then.

So we wouldn’t be surprised to see more hints at what’s to come in the next few days and weeks, as the countdown clock ticks on. In the meantime, however, while Live Search US market share continues to remain flat (at somewhere between 6% and 10%, depending on the reporting service), certain aspects of Live Search, in particular cashback, seem to be making an impact.

In a blog post on May 15, Nielsen Online looked at year-over-year growth for product search, and Live Search Product Search and cashback featured strongly:

And so Live Search Cashback was born. With technology derived through Microsoft’s acquisition of Jellyfish.com, the Cashback program immediately took off, driving 140 percent increase in traffic to MSN/Windows Live Shopping Search from the previous month. As many wondered if the novelty would quickly wear off, the Live Shopping Search audience grew 615 percent over the year. Even more impressive: it was one of only two Top Ten Shopping Search Providers to grow their audience from April 2008 to April 2009.

The Nielsen post goes on to say that shopping search is a small part of overall search share, noting that “searches conducted on shopping-specific engines only comprise between one and two percent of total search activity”. However, as Jellyfish.com founder Mark McGuire says in a blog post reacting to the Nielsen post:

Use cashback when you want to buy something and Microsoft shares advertising revenue back with you. The end result of this is that more folks use Live search for commercial queries, leaving Google with non-commercial search traffic (e.g., when I need to find the address of my local public library I go to Google, when I’ve got my credit card in hand, I search at Live cashback). The data published by Nielsen backs this up, showing that Live Search is the most efficient engine at generating sales for its advertisers. This is small now, but think about what happens if Microsoft can continue to siphon off commercial queries, and the big amount of ad dollars chasing those queries.

Live Search cashback “exponentially growing”: 5M pageviews and 10k purchases every day

Kip Kniskern — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 04:59:19 GMT

Live Search cashback hasn’t publically shared many numbers that we’ve seen, so these numbers kind of jumped off the screen when we noticed them in a Tweet. Clicking through to the article, the numbers weren’t attributed, but it wasn’t too hard to track them back to a Microsoft Careers post, advertising for an SDET in “Subscription and Commerce”. From the Codename Windows post (taken from the Careers job listing):

Cashback is changing the way online shopping works - it is the future of online shopping: users search for a product, buy it, receive CashBack from Microsoft subsidized by the merchants, creating a win-win cycle where merchants are encouraged to increase the CashBack to attract more users, benefiting both parties. We have launched version 1.0 of CashBack and we get more than 5,000,000 views a day and 10,000 purchases every day - and we’re exponentially growing!

Live Search cashback has integrated into Live Search Products (which incidentally recently shut down the Live Search Product Upload beta). The Careers post goes on to clarify a bit more just where everything sits:

We’re part of the CSAT (Commerce Search Advertising Transactions) which in addition to the Product Search owns the transactions platform for several online services across the company (such as Xbox Live, Zune, AdCenter, Office Live, MSN, OneCare, CRM Live and Windows Live), providing the payments infrastructure used by all these services.

Just imagine what cashback could do with a solidified brand and some advertising push behind it.

Live Search cashback updated; now integrated with Live Search Products

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 02:17:00 GMT

Live Search cashback, the program that pays US users of Live Search to purchase certain products after conducting Live Searches for them, has been integrated into Live Search Products, according to a blog post on the Live Search team blog.

Integration with the Live Search Products vertical is a natural fit which makes getting cashback a natural part of online search, shopping, and research. In addition to bringing cashback to Products, a number of improvements have been made to the product:

There are quite a few enhancements you’ll see now that we’ve combined these two interfaces. We have improved relevance and site performance now that we’ve migrated from the legacy Jellyfish technology (a company Microsoft purchased in October 2007) to our own Live Search platform. You’ll now see reviews and Opinion Ranking on the product pages . Opinion Ranking crawls the Web for reviews, categorizes them into features, then provides ratings for those product features. You can also browse by feature and sort by ratings.

I actually just used cashback the other day to purchase a first gen brown (of course) Zune from eBay, receiving an instant 10% off my Buy It Now purchase. The discount has been fluctuating nearly every day for eBay purchases, from a low of 9% to a high of 13% recently (at one point last fall cashback for eBay Buy It Now purchases was 35%!). I was quite happy with the experience, and pleased to receive notification that my cashback reward was immediately credited to my account, nice!

Don’t Miss Out On Cashback Offers With MSN Toolbar

Sunshine — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:36:15 GMT

Afraid to miss out on a Live Search Cashback offer? You won’t if you use the MSN Toolbar, which now contains a Cashback-offer-detecting mechanism. If there is Cashback available for the item you were searching for the icon on the toolbar will gleam. Clicking the gleam will bring you to the page where the Cashback offer is available. So you will never find yourself in a situation like this one:

“I bought a Wii online; and then found out the next day that I could have saved almost $100 had I used Live Search Cashback!! I was so mad.”

Best thing of it all is that it doesn’t matter where you search, be it on Live Search, Google, Yahoo or Craigslist.

This version of MSN Toolbar was released May last year and is powered by Microsoft Silverlight.

Live Search : Your everyday online cash detector
Previous articles on Live Search Cashback

Edit: Live Search Cashback is still only available for US residents, 18 years of age or older - FAQ

Live Search cashback/eBay problems continue

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 07:10:00 GMT

Live Search cashback apparently continues to be beset with problems, at least for a subset of customers who used the service over the holidays to purchase items on eBay. We first reported problems some customers were having on February 4th, and then posted again the next day with a statement from Stefan Weitz from Live Search, saying that “we’ve investigated the issue and have taken steps to correct it”.

However a 12 page thread over at coupon listing service and community FatWallet.com shows that the issue is seemingly far from corrected. A report on the thread at AuctionBytes.com, “The independent trade publication for online merchants”, details continuing problems, and received a statement on Wednesday from Live Search spokesperson Whitney Burk:

The Live Search cashback team is working aggressively with eBay and PayPal to resolve this issue, which has impacted a very small percentage of our customers. We're asking those customers to provide an email address and the details of their order here https://support.search.live.com so we can keep them updated as we work toward a resolution. We appreciate customers' patience as we sort through this issue and offer our sincere apologies for the inconvenience.

However the story isn’t quite the same according to emails from support quoted in the FatWallet.com thread. Support person Elizabeth B. wrote to FatWallet.com Senior Member “Dys” today:

I understand your frustration. This issue has proved to be more complicated than we initially anticipated. Our payment team is working with PayPal to determine why so many of these payments are failing.

Some FatWallet.com posters have taken to reporting Microsoft to the Better Business Bureau, and are at least contemplating suing them in small claims court. To Microsoft’s credit, they are working on the issue, but the pr damage being done by what appears to be a technical snafu (in the literal sense of the acronym) would seem to negate any good will created by the cashback program, at least for those affected.

Update: cashback cash on the way

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 17:29:00 GMT

Yesterday Sunshine wrote about some issues regarding Live Search cashback payments on eBay purchases, and this morning we received a clarification from Live Search Director Stefan Weitz:

“While we regret the delay of Live Search cashback payments between Jan. 29 and Feb. 1, we’ve investigated the issue and have taken steps to correct it. More than 90 percent of the customers affected will receive payouts to their PayPal account today. We are working directly with the remainder of impacted customers to walk them through the steps required to receive their cash back.”

While the problems with Live Search cashback are regrettable, it seems to be getting a positive reaction from consumers. We expect to hear more on cashback soon, stay tuned.

Live Search Cashback, troubled but working on it…

Sunshine — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:47:27 GMT

After a Cashback Blackout on Black Friday, it is now facing problems with payouts. Back in December Live Search Cashback introduced Instant Cashback for eBay purchases, which promised immediate deposit of your cashback amount into your Paypal account for eligible shoppers. But is Microsoft holding up this promise? There are reports of people seeing the amount in their cashback account immediately but still had to wait 60 days to claim the money. After those 60 days they were greeted with the following message:

“We’ve encountered a problem depositing your cashback reward into the PayPal account that you used for your eBay purchase. But we will keep trying.”

Customers who emailed the Cashback support team were left waiting, sometimes over 72 hours! WalletPop however contacted Microsoft’s Cashback support team through here and received an answer within 2 days:

The delayed payout issue for all users should be corrected by the end of the week with funds showing up in Paypal accounts by February 9.

So if you were one of those affected, thinking maybe Live Search Cashback is a scam:
Live Search Cashback is not a scam, Microsoft will hold up to its promise. It may take a while, problems happen, but problems also will be solved. If anything is wrong contact them through https://support.search.live.com/ so they can look into it.

Previous articles on Live Search Cashback

More Search numbers – Live Search Club quietly kicking a@#

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 23:49:09 GMT

The latest Compete.com numbers came out just before Christmas (Dec 23, for November), and while much of it is more of the same, a couple of interesting items caught our eye. It’s a little hard to get a gauge on any trends, as Compete changed some methodology in August, except to say that Google is still far and away the leader.

Compete has been separating out the numbers for Club Live from the Live Search numbers for some time. The set of games you play on Club Live, using Live Search as an aid, are certainly a blatant attempt to “game” the system, but what’s interesting is how much play Club Live is getting. As Jeremy Crane points out in his Compete blog post:

Club Live contributed 2.6ppts and nearly 300 million queries to MSN/Live. (To put things in perspective, Club Live gets more queries than either Ask or AOL.) Club Live continued to grow, with query volume up 3.4% versus the prior month and 7.2% for the year.

That Club Live gets more queries per month than either Ask.com or AOL is astounding, really. A fairly unscientific observation: people who are attracted to winning Club Live games might be interested in using Search to get deals of other kinds (think Live Search cashback), or at least that’s what Live Search seems to be counting on. Whether or not Club Live will make much of a difference in the long run remains to be seen, but anything that generates 300 million queries per month can’t hurt.

Live Search Team Apologizes For Black Friday Cashback Blackout, Promises Full Refund To Those Affected!

Sunshine — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:56:02 GMT

HP and Microsoft’s Black Friday promise of 40 percent refunds on everything in HP's online store got plagued with outage. When Microsoft Live Search Cashback came back up the refund offered was lowered to 3% at that!

What happened? A significant spike in traffic caused the system to go down so the databases and indexes that support Microsoft Live Search Cashback had to be rebuild and redeployed! Of course this took some time, but it’s all fixed now.

If you made a HP purchase through Live Search Cashback last Friday and got a 3% refund while expecting 40%, Microsoft will give you the full refund if you follow up on it through the support site:

We want to respond to those of you who've commented about your problems using cashback last Friday. For a few hours on Friday, November 28, Live Search cashback experienced an unexpected outage. If you completed a purchase that day, you can follow up on a cashback rebate by contacting Microsoft at https://support.search.live.com/. Be sure to have the order number and the email address provided for the transaction.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Let’s hope they are prepared for more traffic now, esp. with the new Live Search Instant Cashback feature for eligible shoppers on eBay! It does explain somewhat why we still haven’t seen the promised roll out to other markets :(

Live Search : Black Friday cashback blackout

Live Search Instant Cashback!

Sunshine — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:12:00 GMT

Good news! Live Search Cashback will now deposit your cashback amount immediately into your Paypal account when you purchase at eBay. This Live Search Instant Cashback feature just got announced at the Live Search Blog:

I'm happy to announce that we've just released the Instant cashback feature with eBay. Instant cashback will be eligible for some, but not all users. Eligible shoppers will be notified online after completing a purchase on eBay.

Here's how it works
When you search for a product on Live Search — say an Xbox — within the results returned you'll see an eBay ad with the gold coin cashback icon and "Live Search cashback."

Click the eBay ad to go to http://www.ebay.com/ and make your purchase.

After completing the payment with PayPal, you'll receive a message saying you're eligible for "instant cashback." Yippee!

The cashback amount is automatically deposited into your Paypal account and posted to your cashback account.

Pretty neat huh, no more waiting for 60 days to get your cashback…you can even spend it again immediately if you want! What more could you wish for this holiday season? Well ehhh…besides maybe an extension of Live Search Cashback to other markets….

Previous articles on Live Search Cashback

Windows Live Announcements recap: What a week we’re having!

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:24:13 GMT

This week marked the unveiling of Windows Live Internet Services, news of a refreshed Windows Live Essentials beta coming soon, some new features (and some old ones) from Live Search, and lots of mobile news as well. Let’s recap:

Windows Live Internet Services
On Wednesday evening, Microsoft unveiled the online portion of Windows Live, which should be rolling out to users in the next “couple of weeks”. Lots and lots of changes and new stuff:

Home.Live.com – The starting place for Windows Live online
What’s New Feed – A totally new feature, aggregating news about your network and what they’re doing, including news from a variety of third-party sources (Twitter, Flickr, PhotoBucket, Yelp, Amazon.com, etc., etc.).
Windows Live Profile – A single place to manage your profile information. Was part of Spaces, now stand-alone and expanded.
Windows Live People – Again, a single place to manage your “Network”, combining Hotmail contacts, Messenger contacts, and Spaces Friends.
Windows Live Photos – Like Profile, Photos no longer a part of Spaces, but available on its own or across Windows Live. Greatly enhanced viewing experience.
Windows Live Groups – A new service to create an online Group, including an email address and url for the group, and including a Group specific What’s New feed, membership list, Calendar, SkyDrive, and a discussion list.
Windows Live SkyDrive – Soon to include 25gb of storage, with new features like saving to a .zip file, and move or copy to another SkyDrive folder.
Windows Live Hotmail – Will soon add ever increasing storage, POP access both in and out for free, and Web Messenger integration.

Recap: LiveSide posts on Windows Live Internet Services:

Windows Live internet services: Major release announced
Windows Live Feature Complete
Windows Live People Review
SkyDrive - What's to come
Hotmail, and early look

Our interview with Brian Hall Part 1
Our interview with Brian Hall Part 2: Demo

Selected posts on Windows Live Internet Services:

www.windowslive.com

MS PressPass: Microsoft Introduces Updated Windows Live Services
Windows Live Virtual Press Kit

Brian Hall: Windows Live keeps your life in sync
Kara Swisher: MS “Facebooks” WL services
Omar Shahine: WL People and the past 12 months
SkyDrive team blog - “Our Next Update”

Windows Live Essentials
With the online services announcement on Wednesday, official word also came of an upcoming refresh to the Essentials suite, which we should also see in the “next couple of weeks”

Recap: LiveSide posts on Windows Live Essentials

Messenger, a sneak peak

Windows Live Mobile
With the new Windows Live services come a number of improvements to Windows Live on mobile

damaster and Sunshine gave us a great overview:

Recap: LiveSide posts on Windows Live Mobile

New Mobile Search release
Windows Live for mobile Wave 3

Selected posts on Windows Live mobile

Phil Holden: Live Search for mobile

Live Search

Live Search made some announcements of their own this week: touting the success of Live Search cashback, and unveiling Live Search for Video: TV shows. (In my attempt to follow the PubCon keynote via Twitter, I posted that Birds Eye imagery for an Image Search on places was new. While this was demoed at PubCon, it isn’t actually new, as my colleagues were quick to point out to me :-| ).

Oh and by the way, if you’re in Canada, Live Search has a Big Ticket promotion for you:

Microsoft Live Search 'Big Ticket' promotion

Big Ticket Search will run from October 31st through December 31st. Every time our users search at bigticketsearch.com, they have a chance to win awesome prizes every hour, 24 hours a day. We'll be giving away tons of prizes including 2 new Mitsubishi Lancers, Raptors VIP package, Home Entertainment Systems, Laptops, $10,000 cash, Ticketmaster Gift Cards, Zunes, Xboxes, Raptors Season Tickets and Raptors Memorabilia.

(Thanks to Windows Live Chronicles)

Recap: LiveSide posts on Live Search

Live Search: cashback traction
Silk Road: new Live Search API v 2.0beta
TV Show Search

Our previous post on Bird's Eye in Image Search

Selected posts on Live Search

Search Engine RoundTable post on PubCon keynote with Satya Nadella

Live Search blog: TV show search
Live Search blog: new Live Search APIs

Live Search cashback sees “positive traction” in three key metrics

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:32:08 GMT

A press release timed to Satya Nadella’s keynote speech at PubCon, an online advertiser’s convention held in Las Vegas announced today that Live Search cashback “has seen positive traction in all three of the key metrics on which the company said it would report: number of offers in the system, advertiser return on investment (ROI), and percentage of commercial search queries as measured by comScore Inc.”. Microsoft is also announcing a new set of advertisers joining the cashback program, including AT&T, Drugstore, Inc., FTD, Gap, Inc, KMart, and Saks Fifth Avenue.

“We are pleased to report a 30 percent increase in the number of product offers available in Microsoft Live Search cashback, indicative of the strong advertiser interest in the program and early results on its ROI,” said Brad Goldberg, general manager of Microsoft Live Search. “We have seen an average of 4.5 million unique users per month visiting cashback who have conducted more than 68 million commercial queries. We believe this early traction speaks to the differentiated and unique value proposition of Microsoft Live Search cashback for both consumers and advertisers, especially in these tough economic times.”

While the total US search market share has remained flat at best for Live Search, cashback is having an impact on potentially the most lucrative section of searches, commercial search. Again, according to the press release:

…according to a custom comScore study, in the second quarter of 2008, Microsoft Live Search referred almost 12 percent of total U.S. commercial online transactions and about 13 percent of total U.S. online spending among key retail categories. Microsoft Live Search placed among the top two U.S. engines in five of the 10 key commercial categories for conversion rate, including Computer Hardware, Movies & Videos, Home & Garden, Music, and Travel. Microsoft Live Search also shows a competitive advantage in attracting high-quality and high-spending buyers. Microsoft Live Search ranked as the top engine among the competitive set by a large margin in dollars spent per buyer, across the combined 10 key commercial categories.

Microsoft is also announcing a new set of APIs for Live search, called “Project Silk Road.” “The service includes a significant expansion to the Live Search APIs that enables publishers and web developers to monetize their traffic through search and provide their users with a customized, high quality search service that meets their specific needs.”, according to a Microsoft spokesman.

Live Search Cashback offers 25% rebate on Ebay Buy-It now

Chris — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 01:27:51 GMT

While search share may not be increasing in the Microsoft camp, they are definitely trying hard to disrupt the market. Their latest effort involves Live Search Cashback, the rebate program that rewards you for buying products through Live Search results.

Users who click through from Live Search to Ebay, and then use Buy-It Now, will receive a 25% rebate to redeem against the purchase!

Unfortunately Cashback is still US only, however I’m sure you can find a friend or two willing to help you out (please check out the shipping costs first). Note to MS, now would be a really good time to show us that UK and EU support you promised.

It looks like the maximum rebate possible from Ebay is $200, which means you’ve got $800 of purchases to make. What are you waiting for?!

Live Search Perks – more rewards for using Live Search

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 06:48:00 GMT

It all started with Live Search Club, the somewhat maligned program to reward users for playing games using Live Search (and somewhat skewing search share counts, causing a bit of a scramble by Compete.com and others). Then last May Live Search introduced “cashback”, again rewarding users for using Live Search, this time in the form of rebates for products bought online.

Now, starting today and running through April 15, 2009, it’s Live Search Perks. By signing up and downloading a toolbar counter, users will be rewarded with “tickets” that can be redeemed for prizes at the end of the promotion, next April. Yes it’s US only, and yes you need to stay with the program for the entire period in order to redeem your tickets.

I talked with Frederick Savoye, a Senior Director at Live Search, about Search Perks and the broader search strategy. As part of “innovating in the business model”, Search Perks, built on the same platform that runs Live Search Club, has shown in tests to increase use of search threefold. “It really helps change people’s behavior”, said Savoy.

The toolbar counter only counts searches, and which search engine you are using, and does not collect any other information about your search habits, Savoy said. Searches conducted from Live Search or from MSN are eligible, although searches from Search and Give, Live Search Club, or MSN Video are not.

Users are awarded 500 “tickets” for signing up, and are awarded one ticket for each search conducted per day, up to a maximum of 25. While the fine print does say that “During the promotion there may be opportunities to receive additional tickets”, a quick calculation puts the maximum tickets available at about 5200, barely enough for a “big prize”, like an Xbox controller. Up to 250,000 participants will be allowed into the program, who must sign up before Dec 31, 2008.

Of course Live Search is going to have to do far more than this to make any headway against Google, and our prediction is that this is going to be seen as another desperate move in a search share war that many consider to be well over. But hey free stuff is free stuff.

Microsoft to roll-out Live Search Cashback to UK, then EMEA

Chris — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:07:00 GMT

At the Cannes International Advertising Festival today, Microsoft has announced it plans to extend the new Live Search Cashback program to the UK.

Launched at the Advance08 advertising summit held in Redmond, Live Search Cashback has been in testing during the past month in only the US market. The service forms part of Microsoft’s new efforts to make progress in the Search market, along with Engagement Mapping, which was also demoed in front of Microsoft’s advertising partners at Advance08.

To recap, Live Search Cashback offers users the chance to search for products they wish to buy, and then offers cashback savings on the purchase. For example on a Microsoft Zune 80GB, a discount of between 2-5% is offered from the various participating stores; Oakley sunglasses have a 9-12% discount. On purchases of $100+ these savings really do add up, so somehow Microsoft has to market this tool well in order to drive growth. Definitely not a trivial task.

Announcing the expansion of the cashback program out to other markets so soon after its initial launch is a good sign. It suggests that user retention or “stickiness” is high, and that both partners and Microsoft are happy with how things have progressed – driving sales and monetising search traffic. With Live Search Club now taking 2.6% of all US search queries, if Cashback can make a similar impact then that will be no small achievement. Whether this is something that “disrupts search” remains to be seen.

I couldn’t get much out of Microsoft about this, but Brad Goldberg, GM of the Live Search Business Unit gave a statement:

“As discussed this week, we have plans to scale our search efforts in EMEA. Cashback is a core part of our strategy and we’ll look at that as part of our overall plans.”