Vladimiras Lekecinskas Blog

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Just wanted to write down some of my new thoughts on Microsoft AdCenter.

In my last post you can find a brief review on it, and some facts of it just got approved by Microsoft itself. There is a topic on SearchEngineWatch forums about AdCenter and one of the AdCenter team members tried answering my questions there… and it seems that he failed to do so.

I had such an assumption:

I assume that when you have 100% of visitors with 20% of MSN Passports in a specific area/time - your new targeting works bad, because you either:

1) Show my targeted ads only to the 20% of visitors that have MSN Passports - then I miss 80% of audience on that particular campaign - so I need to double each campaign twice, one time with this specific targeting and another - without it (to reach the whole audience).

2) Show my targeted ads to all 100% but then - this feature is bad and useless.

100% of traffic = 1000 visitors
20% have MSN passports(targeting works) = 200 visitors
5% are my targeted visitors (let’s say 18y old) = 5% of 200 = 10 visitors

So, among 1000 overall visitors my ads will be shown to the 800 untargeted and 10 targeted ones. Great.

And I’ve got an answer:

Vladimiras – Sorry about the delay here. In spite of how long it took me to get back to you, it turns out that we just don’t have that info in our reports. Which, um, you already knew. So I’m taking this down as a feature request, and I’ll pass it on to the team. Everyone - okay so I didn’t have a good answer here. Or maybe should I say, I had a disappointing answer here. Either way, keep your questions coming so I can hit one I have a good answer to…
Thanks,
adCenter

But that’s not the thing I wanted to say here.

The point is, that if everything is really just like I wrote above (AdCenter beta targets your ads bad, in fact - this targeting is worse than having no targeting at all) - then one more question comes out - why?

And my guesses are:

1) They want to roll it out “as is”, working as it works now. Why? Because any inexperienced person should have very good looking numbers there. You wanted your ads to be displayed among 18-21 year old audience? Sure, with our system you can have it! And the fact that you actually can’t - stays undiscovered. For a while.

2) There is a tiny probability that they actually missed it (world domination complex), and that this issue will be fixed. Personally I don’t believe it could be missed, and don’t believe it can be fixed easily.

3) They have something that we can’t see in this beta. I don’t know what could it be, but technically - they just can’t make this targeting work on visitors without MSN Passports. Of course they can implement a number of reports later… but why not in beta?

Any related links welcomed.

Got a chance to get into MSN AdCenter to review it..

1. No window resize is quite stupid itself, but Ctr+N block is a complete bullshit nonsense.
2. Yeah sure, it targets better than any other system. Show ads in Washington on Saturdays 11pm-3am for 18-25 male visitors. That’s great for sure and people speak mostly about it.

   BUT.

   That works only for peps that have their MSN Passport logged on. And what about all the others?
   They aren’t going to show them my ads at all? No they will (it’s presented as an additional targeting - you can show more ads for an exact group, but you cant show all your ads for it only)!
   So they will you show my ads for everyone (in Washington, Sat, 11-3 you remember). And what percent of visitors in that area has MSN passport? You have your stats and big percentage in overall, but what about that Washington area? What about Saturday and what about 11pm-3am?
   And what if you have at that time and in that area only 10% visitors with your MSN Passport? Will I get a chance to know it? I guess no. Well - not so far.

3. No Filters. Grrreat. YOU CAN WRITE THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - and it will be ok. Or not - when reviewer will take a look at it, he will decide if it is good or not. Please don’t use brand names - they say. Was it so hard to create a database of forbidden names? Your reviewers have it for sure - so why can’t we have it like Google does (if it’s bad or reserved - you Just can’t use it - or you have to request an exception).
4. No campaigns and that’s awful. They have so called “orders”, but campaign names are just some kind of order marks. So if I have 40 clients with 10 campaigns each - we have a huge big mess. I demand grouping and campaign hierarchy. You say I’m too tied to AdWords interface - but I have 100+ campaigns in it - and it will be a complete mess with them in AdCenter.
5. Budget limits go only for all “order” (which is keyword group in AdWords). So, for an example - if I have a client and he has 10 different campaigns with overall $1000 budget - I will have to do my math every time I try managing all of it to fit the overall budget.
6. NO CONVERSION TRACKING. Shoot yourself. Well at least it is So Stupid. Do you know people that we need to track leads / signups / sales? Do you know we need to track order amounts? How can I do it in AdCenter?
7. You can’t prepare a set of campaigns - to launch them later. Why? If you pause your order - it will not go for a review. If you will prepare and pause a set of orders (let’s say - my 800kw 10 campaigns set for one of my clients) - and will try to launch them all at once - what will you get?? A review! Go change them, go fix this and that. And what’s most important: please wait. That’s truly Microsoft.
8. They have import from file - and it is good, better than anywhere.
9. They have my day settings (+2 GMT) and this is also nice.
10. Price Estimation is a crap so far, but I’ve read they work on it. We wait (c) eminem.
11. Reporting is poor. Just so: poor.
12. Keyword research tool has region chooser and it is good, however its results are quite strange so far: dvd - 74, sex - 0, blog- 417, services - 0, design - 48, computers - 54, apple - 88, msn - 10 000. How can that happen?
13. Different negative match options for each and every keyword is bad. No campaign-wide negative keywords. Keyword import from xls will help but that’s bad in overall.
14. The most annoying thing: it’s damn slow! And if I can’t blame them so far for all those bugs and usability issues - it’s in beta anyways, but why so slow? Do I really need all these drop down menus that take a couple of seconds to open?

Good targeting is great - if you have all other features in place. And I don’t need it if all other things look and work like win95 pre-alpha release.