As you may know, AdCenter is Microsoft's version of Google's Adwords programme. Both these are examples of pay-per-click advertising. Put simply, PPC works like this: You stump up cash for adverts displayed on MSN and Google. What you pay depends on how much you are prepared to pay per click on your advert. The more you bid the higher up the page your ads appear. Of course the reality is much more complex, and PPC is a good way to lose money if you don't know what you are doing.

So MSN and Google provide various tools to help you chose the keywords to bid on, what to bid and more. This is where Microsoft's snappily named "adCenter Add-in Beta for Excel 2007" comes in. It is unique in that it is not web based. You download the package from here and it installs as a part of Excel 2007. (If you don't have Excel 2007, they'll give you a trial of that too!)

Once installed you need to give the details of your AdCenter account, so you can interrogate the AdCenter server, where all the juicy marketing information is stored. The tool then allows you to pull off some amazing market research which will inform not only your PPC efforts, but your wider marketing campaigns.

Use the Adcenter Beta to:

• Expand your keyword list with related terms suggested by advertisers,  that contain your keyword, or are in a similar theme.
• Get monthly volumes (both historical and forecast) for each keyword, click through rates and cost per click to identify the most important keywords to your business.
• Refine your keyword list by geographic and demographic factors.
• Find the top performing keywords in various sectors.

The reason we are so excited by this is that we know that any good internet marketing campaign starts with great research, and this AdCenter Beta is an excellent research tool. I highly recommend downloading it and seeing what it will do. We have already used it for a parallel scheme where we buy advertising on MSN and make money with Google Adsense, but that is a story for another time!