Affiliate Marketing

MSN’s adCenter is the third largest pay per click network available to the search engine marketer. MSN was late to the game, following both Yahoo and Google’s lead. One would think this would give them an advantage, enabling them to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors, but sadly they have not. In my experience MSN’s adCenter interface is the worst one of the three by far. Even Yahoo Search Marketing’s old interface was much better than the UI offered by MSN adCenter.

Inability to Search

MSN adCenter makes it very difficult to find an adgroup by name unless you know which campaign it is in. They offer a search interface, but if you try to search across the whole account, it does not allow you to. The only way to search is within each campaign. To further complicate things, they do not allow you to view all the adgroups in a campaign on one page. You can only view 30 adgroups per page, and when you have a large account like we do, this is very inconvenient. Not surprisingly, Google Adwords has the best search interface by far, allowing you to search by any keyword and generating a list of adgroups and keywords that match your search. All pay per click networks should aspire to do the same.

Bulk Uploads?

This is perhaps the worst bulk uploading interface I have seen. They separate the keyword uploads from the ad copy uploads, and you have to upload at the adgroup level. You cannot simply create a sheet and upload an entire account like you can in both Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Adwords is again the leader in this arena with their Adwords Editor. Adwords Editor is a desktop program that allows you to work locally, make changes, create new adgroups, create new campaigns, adjust bids, and more. When you are done with all your changes you simply upload them to your account and they are live in a matter of minutes. Yahoo has a somewhat more complicated system, but it works, and though I haven’t tested it yet, they now offer an Adwords sheet converter that offers to take your Adwords account and copy it into your Yahoo account. This is a great idea if it actually works.

MSN adCenter has nothing of the sort, though I was told a desktop interface like that of Google’s is in the works. Knowing Microsoft it might be years away. It is badly needed to say the least. To upload anything into MSN adCenter you have to manually create your adgroup in their interface, then navigate to the upload page, upload your keywords, then upload your ads. There are 2 separate sheets for these. I have been asking myself in disbelief for months: there has to be a better way. They must offer some sort of conversion system. That brings me to MSN adCenter’s “Quick Launch”.

Quick Launch?

I called adCenter support to ask for their help in moving my many Adwords and Google accounts into MSN. I thought they would be happy to help, as we would be spending thousands each month as a result of the move. After telling me there is no bulk upload that can be used across the entire account, they told me about their QuickLaunch program. This is a program the MSN offers to new advertisers for the first 30 days to help them setup their account and to move Adwords and Yahoo accounts over to their interface. Perfect! Well that is what I thought at the time. So I got on the list. About a week later I was contacted by someone from the Quick Launch team. She wanted to setup a time to meet when we could go over our needs and get started. We setup a time to meet. The day before the meeting she cancelled because she was sick. Another week passed. Then the following week she attempted to contact me again, but I was in the middle of a week of meetings…Next thing I know the 30 days had passed and I no longer qualified for their Quick Launch because I was no longer a new account holder. In the mean time I had several employees adding adgroups to their system manually.

I contacted them again about 2 weeks ago, and I explained my situation. This time I got a really nice woman who sympathized and promised to reinvoke my status into the Quick Launch program, due to the circumstances of the expiration. She has put in requests to the Quick Launch team 4 times so far with no response. Apparently they are treating her, a Microsoft employee, as poorly as they were treating me. They basically ignore her. She contacts me every few days to let me know she is still working on it, but frankly, I doubt she will ever get me any help. It is quite ironic that the system named “Quick Launch” turns out to be anything but…

Open Discussion of MSN adCenter experiences

I want to open up a discussion of people’s experiences with MSN adCenter, whether it has to do with Quick Launch or just work with it in general. Perhaps I am the only one having these problems, but I doubt it. Please share your experiences in the comments section. Perhaps someone has some tips on how to make it work, or perhaps it is a lost cause.