It’s been a while since I’ve used Microsoft AdCenter. I used it when I last had a regular job a little over a year ago now, but at the time, I had reps that would take care of anything I needed. Since then (and also a bit before then), I stayed away from AdCenter unless I specifically needed to. My feelings about it were that it was just too much of a pain to use in relation to the volume it brought in. It’s been about 2 weeks since I’ve started using AdCenter again. Some things have changed - others haven’t.
Setting Up Campaigns
Setting up new campaigns in AdCenter is pretty annoying overall. I’ve gotten used to the ease of using AdWords Editor, Yahoo’s bulk sheets or setting up campaigns manually. Google is still easiest and while Yahoo doesn’t have the best system in place, they’re both much better than Microsoft AdCenter’s. There were two main problems with AdCenter that I came across, making updates and manually updating ad group settings.
There might be an easy way to go about submitting everything, but I didn’t find it when I was adding my keywords. First, I made the mistake of not putting the {param2} as my destination URL within my import sheet and wanted to bulk update the creatives. I couldn’t find any info on how to update creatives using the bulk sheets so I tried to just resubmit it and hoped for positive results. However, pretty much as expected, it just created duplicates of the creatives. I then started to manually delete the old creatives, but because of the poor navigation, that was taking forever. Instead, I just deleted the whole campaign and submitted a new one.
The 2nd problem included trying to change setting. Ideally, I wanted to set dayparting and geotargeted settings, but Microsoft requires you to do this per ad group. Again, with their poor navigational structure, that would’ve taken forever and it just wasn’t worth the time it would take. In addition to not being able to manually navigate between ad groups efficiently, for geotargeting, Microsoft doesn’t allow you to select all states and then remove ones you don’t want. Instead, they force you to select each state you want. I needed most states so selected each one for the number of ad groups I have would have taken quite some time.
Overall, after getting the hang of it, I was able to submit a new campaign in Microsoft within a few minutes, but if the campaigns had a requirement to have certain settings like geotargeting or dayparting, then it would’ve taken me at least a full day if not more to get everything updated.
Campaign Management
Campaign management using AdCenter is pretty poor overall. Their drop down menus are nice to use to navigate, but it’d be nice to also have a “next” and “back” button. Making bulk changes is difficult except for certain aspects such as bids or turning on/off content. In general, making changes within the account is pretty annoying. It can be slow, pretty difficult to navigate and just cumbersome. The system also seems to perform much better in internet explorer rather than Firefox which, to me, is a negative.
Reporting
Reporting is decent. Microsoft offers automated reporting, however, I’ve noticed that one of my reports is being sent in the evening rather than early morning so when I’m creating my own reports, I still need to login and run the report. The online reports do offer a filtering option making online reporting more useful than Google’s or Yahoo’s. It’s a nice feature, but I like to play with the data more within excel than in the browser. The reporting aspects do offer the ability to customize the data columns similar to Google which is definitely a good thing.
Performance
Actual performance is one of the most important aspects of AdCenter. My ROI is actually higher on MSN than on the other 2 engines and the traffic volume is about 10% of what I get from Google. I haven’t spent too much time optimizing the bids yet, so I should be able to expect to see that ROI come down a little but also an overall increase in volume and overall profit.
Overall
Microsoft looks to have improved their traffic and performance since the last time I’ve used their system. Overall, I think it can be worth using AdCenter, but there’s still a lot of improvement that should be made by Microsoft. Due to their current issues and traffic volume, I still won’t be putting as much time into Microsoft as I would other engines, but I will be using it as a way to diversify my marketing efforts.
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