So, we have seen a significant decrease in impressions and sales in the past 3-4 months on MSN. Although it's never been a huge profit-center for us, it's always held its own, now it's not.

Today our rep mentioned that MSN's algorithm would serve up an ad from a different adgroup if it has a higher CPC and (I guess MSN's version of) "quality score". This sounds all well and good except it could mean that people searching for a general (example) "car" keyword are being served a very specific "Car port storage" ad which would definitely not be good. I am having trouble digesting this information in any meaningful way and have NO idea whether this is what is causing our trouble, but I'm really surprised that I've not heard about this before now. It seems that they are trying to emulate google's algorithm but (in my opinion) totally failing.

Maybe I'm looking at this wrong? Anyone else seeing sales decrease over the past few months? I'm tempted to just bail out of MSN altogether, but I keep reading that it is still accounting for 10% of search traffic ... ugh.