Conversions are the bottom line, and, yes: MSN does convert better than G for some reason. Maybe it's because a larger percentage of G traffic is composed of competitors and SEO people researching keywords and keyphrases. Yep.
In my experiences, MSN delivered more quality traffic to my site compared to Google as it is easier to compete for relavent keywords in that search engine.
we provide digital products and msn definitely has a higher conversion ratio when compared to yahoo and google for us.
If you have adsense ads, MSN traffic should click on them more because typically MSN users are less web savvy.
msn ranks new sites higher for few weeks and after that i tends to go back to more optimized pages. Any search engine traffic is valuable considering the fact that you are ranked only for your performance in page optimization.
the original poster was asking about the quality of traffic, not the quantity. and yes, the traffic from msn (and yahoo, and ask, etc) convert much, much better than traffic from google in most cases. most people attribute this to the fact that google users consist of those that are more net-savvy, and less likely to buy.
I am finding lately (the past few months), that MSN and Yahoo both spider all of my sites more than google does, using the same keywords. I get alot of quality traffic from MSN, meaning that typically, people who find my sites via MSN are more likely to join, than people who find me via Google.
Google brings more traffic for us, but MSN visitors have much higher PageView/Visitor and $/Visit ratios for us. Therefore, we can say MSN traffic is very high quality for us.
I have few sites ranking #1 in MSN but the traffic is negligible. Yes, it depends if you're ranking in a very competitive keyword to get quality traffic from MSN.
as far as advertising goes, the traffic i see from msn clicks on my ads more than the traffic from google.
To me it seems that the more it goes the more MSN visitors become like G visitors, still a lot better though. Anybody else the same experience
I get better rated for my keywords in MSN (especially for my new sites) but the traffic is still low... here's hoping its popularity increases over time.