In relation to PPC Search Engines the word “incentivised” is about on par with a class one expletive and in most scenarios in the pay per click arena getting someone to do something by incentivising them to act is generally seen as bad practice so I was a little surprised when MSN launched BigSnapSearch.com as an eight week promotion where you are incentivised to search and could win prizes as a result.

The BigSnapSearch.com site is basically MSN Live Search with Dick and Dom pointing out you could win one of many prizes by searching, From a user point of view I must say it’s a good visual concept, you perform a search as normal and if two cards that appear in the header match you win that prize, simple and fast But I’m not convinced it’s helping anyone achieve anything except brand recognition for the prize sponsors who seem to be Virgin as the daily prizes are 23 Virgin Experience Days from £49 to £500 value , 1 £500 Virgin Voucher and from March the 3rd one player will win a Necker Island trip for two, as of today at 1600 there are 1189 prizes left.

Now personally I’m no fan of incentivised search if I’m paying the bills or managing PPC on behalf of a client as traffic tends to be of a lower standard than that of uninfluenced origin however I think this is one of the most visually engaging versions of as site incentivising traffic to carry out a search that I’ve seen, and by the looks of it the main aim of MSN with this promotion is to get people to Add Live Search to their machines.

I guess the plus point is that this may help MSN acquire a slice more market share but the downside could be at the experience of existing PPC advertisers who’s click through ratios may slide as a result of millions of untargeted, incentivised searches where the user is simply entering any random search term to see if they can get two matching cards.

The promotion’s result may be that more people try Live Search which can only be a good thing for those sick at being at the mercy of AdWords so ultimately anything that makes any headway into loosening Google’s stranglehold on the paid search front is most welcome but existing MSN advertisers may be wondering what’s going for a couple of months if this BigSnapSearch promotion generates high volume searches with low click through ratios or worse such as untargeted traffic clicking on ads out of vague curiosity after typing in a random search phrase to try to win something rather than clicking on a search result after performing a search due to a genuine need as would be the normal paid search scenario.

Good luck to MSN but I hope it’s not at the expense of existing advertisers.