Not a big fan of MSNadcenter

I am just starting to use MSN Adcenter, so don't have a lot to report as far as results. I have had a very good experience with their customer support when I was getting my account set up- very helpful.

 

Can you tell us which niche you're promoting?

 

So far I have had a horrid time with MSN. I signed up 8 days ago and they still have not reviewed my ads/keywords and thats after 2 trouble tickets filed to find out whats going on. I received no mail from their on the matter.

 

Yea, i have found the same kind of problems. I started in Adcenter when i first started and didnt see any problems. Now, with the increase in users and their terrible system, my PPC just isnt worth it anymore. MSN definitely needs to be reworked. Also, their content network is worthless.

 

I have spent a little money there with very little to no results

 

I think the results are good in using Msn Adcenter. It is worth in investing with them.

 

interface sucks, but full of buyers. think of all those geeks that love MS!

 

MSN can bring you some high converting traffic. Try using less keywords per adgroup and using more negative keywords with the bulk edit tool.

 

No, I can blame them for putting out a crappy product. They have cash reserves that would fund more than half the countries of the world on an annual basis. They're just a giant bureaucracy and they almost always start off very slow and turn out crap for a few years until they get it right.

Anyway, my personal experience with adCenter comes from the current client. They have a five figure budget on all the majors and bid on the same niches (with a fairly similar group of keywords at the moment) on all three. AW converts (not clicks, conversions) into the four figures every day, YSM into the mid-high three figures and AC, at its best, converted barely into three figures. That's fine, you expect them to pretty much fall out this way in any major niche with a large enough spend to iron out the statistical anomalies.

The problem is that the company is run like a circus, it's horrible. I just had the client open a new AC account finally and are working on organizing it and targeting everything. Why did I have them open a new one? Well, the last one suddenly showed up with all the keywords paused one morning. We asked why and the AC rep immediately said that it was a glitch and that they would fix it. Several days later they said it was fixed and that things should get back to normal. A week or so went by and nothing happened, so we asked again. This time they apparently mumbled something about maybe us looking into the quality of our pages - but wasn't it a glitch? Wasn't the glitch fixed? Who knows. For any of the morons out there who might look to defend them on the basis of quality score issues, first, we run the same pages, keywords and roughly the same ads on the other two majors without these issues. Second, we now run the same thing again on MSN under a different account without having been shut down. In all this time, a month now, the old account has never returned to normal and they've never been able to do anything about it.

Fast forward to setting up the new account. I'll hand them that uploading an entire account works fairly easily. That's where it stops, everything else is a nightmare with AC. We had some groups that used the same ads as others in the upload import csv file, so MSN decided to share the same ad across different groups. We couldn't figure out why changes to querystring variables to one ad were creating abnormalities in the internal tracking system until we figured out what they were doing. Uploading negative keywords also had to be done at the adgroup level, though they fixed this in the weekend's patch. At the moment, we're having trouble targeting US only at the AdGroup settings level. It tells us to pause the adgroup and then submit the change, so we pause it and submit it and it gives us the same error. This has been ongoing for four days with useless responses from support. Another fun problem involved the use of their dynamic {AdId} token. After changing all of our ads to dynamically pass this for tracking purposes and assuming it would be the adgroup ID in the adgroup settings tab, I discovered that it wasn't. So, I went hunting everywhere (documentation, the account, help, Google, you name it) for how to find the AdId number so I could match our DB records to the individual ads. Essentially there's no way to match the dynamically passed id back to the ads without clicking your own ads and capturing the damn ID yourself, which is untenable with the number of ads we have. The only public references to finding the {AdId} were to the adCenter API, so I looked that up and it turns out, unlike AdWords, you have to be invited. Lovely. I emailed support and they didn't even answer the question, they simply told us that there was no {AdId} token and that we should use {keyword}.

Anyway, to cut off before I ramble any further, like any network there is traffic to be had in adCenter and for some niches it probably works fantastically. The interface is complete crap compared to the other two - all high volume users agree completely on the interfaces of the big three. The support department is completely incompetent for anything that doesn't have to do with educating novice users or setting up accounts (basically any real problem that needs real support) and on top of everything they have a massive lead time in approving new additions and changes to the account.

Why do I use MSN? Because it provides traffic at the same cost or slightly cheaper and because inside the company it has become such a joke that we can afford to play around with it as a test platform for strategies on the other networks. It has enough traffic to make it a statistically viable model for changes on real networks like YSM and AW. That's its only real use for us.

That's my $0.02. Microsoft adCenter is an abominable piece of crap to use, the support is so bad that I'd almost prefer to have to talk to the Indian guy at Sprint and adCenter doesn't provide near the traffic or conversions that the other two do - at least in the niche and spend level this client plays in. The funny thing is that if they just had decent support you could tolerate it, but they can't even get that right with all their money.