My Experience with Microsoft adCenter

I've been mainly driving pay per click traffic from Google AdWords and sometimes through Yahoo! Search Marketing - and that too when I feel that I've covered all of the traffic that Google provides. I've been keeping a close watch on Microsoft adCenter ever since it was in Beta - but because I read that the system was too incompetent and that keywords automatically got disapproved within adCenter, I was a little reluctant on trying out adCenter - until now!

I finally signed up with adCenter. The signup process is pretty straight forward and I had no problem getting signed up.

The User Interface

While some PPC advertisers may have complained about the weak UI that adCenter provides - its acceptable that it has not yet matured enough as is AdWords.
And to be true, it is not that difficult for search marketers, who I assume are technically savvy enough to figure out on their own.
Although at times it may be confusing to navigate to your keywords or tweak settings for your ad groups.


Reporting

I've had issues with reporting in adCenter. The main console doesn't update reporting and I contacted my adCenter representative regarding this issue. I've been told that it is working perfectly and that it might be a glitch. I think it is because I've tried it with Internet Explorer and also Firefox and I've cleared all the cookies and cache.

As you can see above in the 2 images, one shows a total impressions for the campaign to be greater than 1152 and on the other hand that same ad group keywords show little to no impressions for majority of keywords. That's kind of strange and that really pisses me of as I am more of a stats junkie and why not? I am paying for all those clicks and that certainly boils down to certain CPM that I am paying to Microsoft so why can't I see the keywords for which my ads were shown?

Support


One of the things that differentiates men from boys in the PPC game is the amount of documentation the search engine has provided and Microsoft certainly has a lot to do in this regard. If they hope to take on Google in the PPC game they've got to improve on their documention.


You can also watch the flash tutorials but watching an 8 minute flash movie for understanding a tiny feature is too much of a time committment for me.


They've got great support mechanism through email too! And guess what? They personally address your issues and I think it's just lately that you can also contact them through phone too! Its great because I don't see that anywhere on AdWords! Overall, their support just simply rocks and I just hope they get their adCenter beast to rock just as well.

Traffic Quality


I can't really say too much about their traffic quality right now because as you see I am not getting the right stats. But regarding just the amount of traffic adCenter lags behind. For the keywords that receive about 40K impressions a day on Google, I've just manages to get about 1152 in a week.


Maybe people aren't searching for that term on Live? Certainly possible!

My Overall Impressions of adCenter

So this covers my first impressions on Microsoft adCenter. I haven't done a thorough review but thats because I don't have all the reports and I will get that sorted out and post the updates.


If you've got any comments, suggestion, advise or want to write for DewDropSEM - feel free to contact me ( dewdropsem@gmail.com ) or comment below!