Microsoft AdCenter - too slow for advertisers needs
I’ve had a PPC campaign running for a while now on Microsoft AdCenter, it ticks along nicely and I’ve had no reason to mess with the keywords or make any changes to the ad copy. However on Monday of this week I decided to make a change to the ad copy to include a reference to an event happening today (Friday).
Now one of the problems with MSN is that once you make a change to an ad group they in effect take the whole ad group offline and change the status to inactive, until they manually review the changes. This wouldn’t be so bad if the campaign was reviewed in a few hours but I’m sitting here on Friday morning and the campaign is still not showing. Yes, 4 days have passed and I’ve lost 4 days of sales. Not only that, but most sales will be made today and there is no guarantee that the campaign will even be up and running by today.
The only saving grace is that MSN AdCenter have a good UK based customer service team where you can talk to real people who give you real answers and do seem to get things done. When I rang today I was told there is an editorial backlog, hence why my campaign has taken longer than expected to be reviewed. The thing is this just isn’t good enough, as this has happened to me a few times before with MSN. The “backlog” excuse has been used with me more times than I care to mention. You would think they would have put something in place by now so it doesn’t keep happening. Apparently not.
MSN need to understand advertisers needs more. The Internet is the fastest paced medium on the planet and we advertisers need a platform where we can react to events and create/change our ads immediately. A wait of 4 days is just not acceptable. I know some advertisers who change their ad copy on their Google AdWords ads every single day of the year - luckily Google lets you do this with minimal fuss. At the moment this just isn’t possible with MSN which is a great shame.
And while I’m on the subject of MSN AdCenter, why oh why oh why is it that when you are looking at your data, you can select date ranges like This Month, Yesterday, Last Month, This Year, Last Year and Entire Time. But you CAN NOT select “Today”?? Once again I don’t think MSN appreciate that we want our data right now, this minute, if I have to wait until tomorrow to see if my PPC campaign is successful then I may have lost all my money!
I really think MSN need to move a lot faster in this competitive space. Its just not good enough to have to wait days and days just so you can make a very minor change to the ad copy in one of your campaigns. And we really do need to know how much money we’ve spent so far today! Not much to ask is it?
What I’m listening to right now: Cheri Dennis - “Portrait Of Love”
Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 11:47 am and is filed under PPC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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[...] adCenter Interview With Kieron Donoghue of Here.org April 2, 2008 10:43 am MelC Search Engine Marketing A few weeks back I commented on some comments about adCenter on Kieron’s Blog. [...]
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
Totally agree Kieron, and I wouldn’t buy the ‘editorial’ excuse for one second. For a start I setup a personal campaign yesterday morning and it was up and running within a few hours. I have no special privileges or super queue jumping powers that I’m aware of
Cheers
Paul
Surely the money they could be making from 4 days of advertising would pay for many more reviewers. Just doesn’t make business sense.
More people reviewing = more adverts online = profit.
Probably why Microsoft are being left behind by the Google superpower.
Your post is worrying particularly in light of Microsoft’s recent bid o buy Yahoo. If their Adcenter is inthis state, one worries what will become of the ultra-efficient Yahoo search marketing when they take over
It’s not just the time to live that’s slow at AdCenter, the whole interface is like wading in treacle to with felt welly boots on. The Excel imports are good though, when they work. I’m particularly fond of this little gem:
Export ads - save the file.
Import ads - Select the file you just saved seconds earlier.
Result - File is incompatible…
I love that one.
But there’s no excuse for it, I’ve had the same thing happen to me. It’s infuriating as well when you make a minor change to your ad copy, then they review it and stop the ad for editorial reasons. So, one has reviewed it and passed it, then someone else looks at it and bans it. You can’t win.
I totally agree about not being able to select ‘Today’ for date ranges, mildly irritating. Haven’t had too much trouble in terms of changing an ad once it’s up and running though, any changes I have made have taken effect within an hour in my experience. I might of just been lucky.
Yet another reason why Google are so far ahead.
You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to match Adwords in terms of functionality etc, especially with the size of Microsoft’s wallet.
Totally agreed, I just signed up for an account, and it took me about 4 days to find out none of keywords were ok. By that time the campaign I was trying to promote was over. I’m running the same campaign in Google with no problems.
I did call support though, and they were very good….something that I’ve read before.
Perhaps this is exactly why they see so much value in Yahoo! They obviously have not cracked this part of their business!
Anyone else think it’s a little intriguing that ysm users are having the same problem so soon after the news of the buyout offer surfaced?
Hi Everyone - Thanks for your feedback and comments. Editorial is very much understood by us to be one of adCenter’s major opportunities and we continue to invest to make the process more efficient and speedy. You will see more improvements to the system over the coming months as we continue to act on your feedback. As Dave #2 did, please do not hesitate to call our support teams who will more more than happy to answer any of your questions, and help you get your ads live. Cheers Mel
I’ve just run into this issue today and found your blog while searching to find out why my revised campaign would not show up. Thanks for the explanation. Knowing what they are doing behind the scenes is half the battle. Thankfully I was able to simply create a new campaign with a different name to get things going. Cheers.