Is it just me, or is AdCenter really buggy?

After I log into AdCenter, many times I get pop-up messages with various error messages about operations not being able to be completed, etc. Eventually I can get things to work, but it does seem that AdCenter is still quite buggy. Has anyone else experienced these problems?

At least the ad serving appears to be working correctly (still driving far less traffic that G AdWords, but oh well.)

And btw, I wish they'd make AdCenter compatible with Firefox! (not holding my breath, but right now this is the only reason I start up MSIE!)

thanks
LC

 

I have the same problems almost everyday. And yes we have to use IE... no choice.

 

That stinks.

 

I've been using adcentre for a couple of months and yes, it is still very buggy.
I often have to try a few times to do what I want.

Also -

- usage statistics are delayed by over 1 day which is terrible if you're testing a new order.

- changes to your order take hours to go through. Yesterday I deleted a bunch of keywords from an order; and they were still showing up in search results all day, finally stopping about 8 hours later. Had to call support and get them to issue me a credit for all clicks on those keywords for the day.

- there's more that I can't be bothered to type up. Suffice to say it has a LOT of issues and was NOT ready to go live.

However...I do like it generally and the traffic has been converting decently.
Will stick it out - after all, its still in beta.

 

Yes, at the very least, there's much less competition for keywords (for now.) I'm sure it will just get better over time.

Still, one of my biggest gripes is that it's MSIE only.

And FWIW, I like MSN AdCenter better than Yahoo, which has a nice looking but crappy interface.

LC

 

Buggy as hell. The keywords are cheaper for me at this point since they don't have near the amount of advertisers Google has which will change if they ever get things sorted out. I get errors for simple things as adding keywords. My biggest issue is the reporting. It needs to be as close to real time as possible ala Google.

 

As a programmer I just don't get the reporting issue. If you point the reports at the same database used to serve ads etc; then reporting should be exactly real time ! You gotta wonder what wierd architecture they're using. Obviously now
they are reporting off a database thats an old copy of the 'live' one. Maybe they have to do this for performance reasons or something...but then, at least copy the database over every hour or two and not daily or whatever they're doing now. I could live with a two hour delay....

 

same thing here, the biggest problem is the low traffic.

 

That makes sense if they're running just one (or a few database servers). But I'm sure they have far more than just a few servers. MSN + affiliate advertising sites represent a huge amount of daily Internet traffic... so there are probably 1000's of separate instances of databases spread around the Internet, and spanning many datacenters... so "real time" reporting through large-scale data aggregation is no easy task.

Frankly this part doesn't bother me anyways... comparatively, Google is not realtime either (hours to a day of delay?), and Google Analytics is always up to a day behind as well.

LC

 

Any word on if or when it will be opened to Firefox? I realize MSN has a proprietary interest in promoting IE, but I would think that not allowing for other browsers would actually cost them business (and money) in the long run.

Sam

 

It's a good point (costing them business)... but then again, Windows Update also still only works on MSIE, and you'd think they'd have a vested interest in keeping people's OS up-to-date and free of known bugs/exploits. I guess we'll just have to wait and see if they eventually support FF in (non-beta) AdCenter. Lots of other people are ranting about this as well... e.g.

http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/05/05/microsoft-doesnt-support-firefox/

LC

 

Well, if nothing else, I guess it's reassuring to know that others share my view. You know, the whole "misery loves company" thing...

Thanks for the info.

Sam

 

The program delivers nice traffic, but I have to watch it everyday to make sure that they dont overcharge me. I had a 1$ a day budget going and it has been doing 11-12$ a day for some reason.

 

The best thing about AdCenter (for now) is that they don't have alot of bidders... good keys are still cheap. And traffic is low, but not too bad (reasonably qualified.)

LC