Slow motion?

It seems like everything that adCenter does is in slow motion vs. Google & Yahoo. I paused my search campaign this weekend since I didn't want it up during their adCenter downtime - I resumed it today, and all my keywords are pending again. Huh? Who needs to approve keywords? Other search engines put ads into pending mode, but not keywords. adCenter support tells me it can take up to 5 business days to approve keywords... . If my campaign isn't back up by tomorrow, I'm going to see if I can get my activation fee refunded (and maybe even my clicks). $5 activation and $5 worth of clicks is really nothing to complain about, but it's the principle that matters. I've started spending money on something that I can't track well using their interface, and they've definitely lost my future business. Google on the other hand has been performing very well for me.

 

They are facilitating us to hate "more" microsoft products.

 

Something is f*cked up with their approvals; any order I've entered in the last week is still not running ! The ads are approved but most of the keywords are still marked 'pending'.

They used to be great with approvals; now its terrible.

 

I spoke with a support rep today and they said that there are some areas that are being worked on within their approvals. Apparently there is a large volume of people signing up from Google, they said 24-72 hour wait, but should be fixed soon.

 

I think that a lot of people have been hearing that AdCenter is a possibly cheaper alternative than Yahoo or Google, so they are getting a bit swamped. Ultimately I'm sure that Microsoft will fix it and that the more competition that is out there, the better. Microsoft seems to have put a lot of effort into building AdCenter and the competition will force Google and Yahoo to improve as well.

 

Being a bit swamped doesn't excuse running a system that doesn't work the way it should - Features that are still broken, even after the 15 hour downtime (which was more like 24 hours I believe) is insane. My account is now cancelled.

 

I just got an email from customer service saying "we ask you to allow up to 10 calander days for keywords to be approved". Wow.

 

In terms of reputation and considering they are trying to get a market for a new product, you'd really think they'd spring a few thousand for a couple of more ad editors.

 

"That is strictly the worst case scenario" is what i heard from support. This is what they gave me for an answer when i said that my ads were just submitted and how long do they take to get up and running:

an "Automated Process" checks the ad: 24-48 Hrs (ad is live at this point) for content on the trademark, or watch lists to make sure the keywords are all okay
the "Crawler" scrubs the website and the ads for content, relevancy and trademarks etc. Time: 24-72 Hrs
If the "Crawler" rejects ads, then you have to submit an appeals template to the "Editorial Team" then they will look into it manually, taking 5 business days.
The support rep explained to me that they are experiencing delays because of the mail marketing stuff they sent out. Now the appeals process can take anywhere from 5 business days to 10 calendar days. So that is only if it gets rejected.

 

An order I created last night is all marked approved this morning, although the ads aren't showing yet. This time I ran my keywords through a filter before uploading them to remove any that contained 'adult' and 'free'....looks like that may have made a difference.

 

I had the same problem with my ads not showing, and when I called MSN, their phone rep and her supervisor couldn't figure out why my ads weren't showing. I'm sure they'll do well with that kind of insight.

 

A few of my newer ads in AdCenter are showing as rejected, but somehow they are showing impressions and clicks.
Based on MadCenter's explanation, it sounds like this could be because they reviewed them after they went live? Is that typical? Thanks.

 

I spoke with AdCenter Support today, and they did confirm that they had issues where the automatic ad review sometimes adjudicated ads after they were live. In my case, I had a few ads that were rejected, yet had impressions and clicks.
In researching this, I realized that they really need better reporting when you have more than one ad active for a given set of keywords. It's not intuitive enough to quickly see how one ad is performing vs the other ad for the same keyword.

 

Similar issue here - all my ads were approved and about 30k keywords added... then I raise the bids 3 days later and they're "Submitted" again?

adCenter is literally reacting and moving a great slower than the other PPC products I'm using. Come on Microsoft! You guys can do better than this.