Forum Moderators: werty
Why when I sort my orders by number of clicks does MSN AdCenter forget this customisation as soon as I click on a link to look at an order's settings.
I find I am taking 5 clicks to do something that would take 1 with Adwords.
How can a company like MSN get this so wrong! It is beyond belief.
Even when I click on an order I have to make a couple more clicks to get to the keyword bids. Surely this is something that should be accessible straight away.
I can spend hours in Adwords - happily working away - no problems
Compare tihs to MSN - 2 minutes and I'm swearing at the screen.
Amy I the only one - surely not?!
my beef is that I deleted a campaign, so now it can't be renamed. Alphabetically, it's on top of all lists. On the report screen, it defaults to this deleted campaign, AND YOU CAN'T SEE that choice without opening up the further options view for customizing reports. Idiotic that my deleted campaign can't be renamed EVER to avoid this situation.
DAMMIT! This is so ridiculous! What is this? June?
Somebody, ANYBODY, please do something about making this interface usable and efficient. Can't you see you're LOSING MONEY every day you don't?
Each reply to the last post can be a copy of the previous issues with the new one tacked on at the end.
Then maybe a representive from MSN can address each issue with a comment and hopefully a deadline for fixing.
So here goess.. going back to my original comment.
Just trying to be constructive - because I really believe MSN need some guidance by real users.
1. When sorting orders by number of clicks please ensure MSN AdCenter does not forget this customisation as soon as a user clicks on a link to look at an order's settings.
2. It should be possible to rename a deleted campaign.
2. It should be possible to rename a deleted campaign.
3. When clicking on Reports, the default is account performance. If I select the date range to be "This month" from the default "Yesterday" and then select "Campaign Performance" the date shoots back to "Yesterday". This should not happen, the date range should not change once I have yet it. I lose count of the number of times I have run a report, only to find it was on the wrong date range.
netmeg - if you ever want to go from being really relaxed to totally stressed out just log into your MSN account - works everytime!
What stress? My campaigns haven't even started yet, fer crysakes.
The most recent exasperating thing I have encountered (besides the fact that it's been 24 hours and my ads have not even been reviewed yet) is that I can't specify certain defaults for my account, such as time zone; I inadvertently let one campaign go as Pacific when I want them all to be Eastern, and apparently there's no way to change the time zone - I was told I'd have to delete the entire campaign and re-enter it. Since that would mean few MORE hours of my life I'd never get back, I decided to be a California Girl for one campaign only. But I'm not impressed.
I had already lifted the keyboard off the desk, and I believe she thought I was going to 'smash it' into something.
....and yeah, that thought HAD gone through my mind.
Nothing you can do for your clients on MSN for 8 more days. Take a nice trip somewhere, and send us a postcard.
:-)
Does someone from MSN actually read this forum?
Well, they've approved two of my campaigns, and they appear to be running. 3 of the remaining 4 are still "pending" and the fourth had a bunch of words rejected, presumably for trademark issues, but the email didn't say and the support person I called said she couldn't tell why either. The thing is, they rejected some trademark names but not all, and they allowed some generic names but rejected some of the generics as well, so it doesn't make any sense. They sent me an appeals form, but if I have to keep going through this, it's going to be a real PITA, as I have somewhere around 7000 keywords, and some are no doubt going to trigger disapprovals (one client is a drug clinic, so the words will be pharmaceutical in nature, another sells supplies to casinos so there are some gaming words, even though the client is not advertising gaming itself)
I was most disheartened to be told that the report feature could take up to two days update the stats, and the campaign and order screens even longer. That will have to change.
Apparently once I get to a certain level I can request a premium account which will come with an account rep and some other perks, and the amount is relatively low for my budget ($10k per month) but until I can get some of the campaigns actually going, I ain't gonna get to that level. Nor do I want to commit that kind of money when I can't get reports in a more timely fashion than two or three days later. I realize that the program is just getting going, but I don't think it's quite ready for prime time.
I can envision this all taking WAY too much time.
Oh, and another issue - I went to look at some of the help files, and apparently it requires you be logged in to a Passport account to view the files. I have a Passport account; I don't use it much, but I have one. When I try to access a help file, it gives me an error message that my Passport account is not available from that page for an unspecified reason, and takes me to a screen where I can CREATE one. I already have one, but when I type in the email for it, it tells me that the @hotmail.com portion of the email address is "reserved". I have no idea what any of this means, but the bottom line is that I can't read the help files.
I remain unimpressed.
3. When clicking on Reports, the default is account performance. If I select the date range to be "This month" from the default "Yesterday" and then select "Campaign Performance" the date shoots back to "Yesterday". This should not happen, the date range should not change once I have yet it. I lose count of the number of times I have run a report, only to find it was on the wrong date range.
4. When running any kind of report please ensure there is a bottom row that shows totals for all columns. I'm currently trying to work out how much I spent last month and see that the only way is to run a campaign report and then use a calculator to add up the costs for each - very poor - definitely needs to be improved.
2. It should be possible to rename a deleted campaign.
3. When clicking on Reports, the default is account performance. If I select the date range to be "This month" from the default "Yesterday" and then select "Campaign Performance" the date shoots back to "Yesterday". This should not happen, the date range should not change once I have yet it. I lose count of the number of times I have run a report, only to find it was on the wrong date range.
4. When running any kind of report please ensure there is a bottom row that shows totals for all columns. I'm currently trying to work out how much I spent last month and see that the only way is to run a campaign report and then use a calculator to add up the costs for each - very poor - definitely needs to be improved.
5. Just discovered that whilst downloading my daily reports to my PDA - I can not open the files in the format used. Lets keep it to xls or cvs format.
Does someone from MSN actually read this forum?
Not only do they READ this forum, they correlate all the comments and take them to regular internal meetings. I know it doesn't feel like it sometimes, but they really ARE trying to improve the product and I am pretty sure that here is one of their prime places for finding out what is most urgent. Adcentre411 is on holiday at the moment but I am sure will be back in the not too distant.
Their biggest problem is scale. Microsoft being Microsoft, adding a full stop to a page is hard enough, leave alone simplifying the navigation! They are tring to prioritise all the different demannds on their programmers and as far as I can see, stuff that affects the READERS of the adverts (like conversion tracking breaking the page in Firefox) gets fixed before the stuff that affects the webmasters (like Adcenter's control panels having issues in Firefox).
Anyway. I can assure you they ARE reading this. I can't assure you that they know how to fix everything!
2. It should be possible to rename a deleted campaign.
3. When clicking on Reports, the default is account performance. If I select the date range to be "This month" from the default "Yesterday" and then select "Campaign Performance" the date shoots back to "Yesterday". This should not happen, the date range should not change once I have yet it. I lose count of the number of times I have run a report, only to find it was on the wrong date range.
4. When running any kind of report please ensure there is a bottom row that shows totals for all columns. I'm currently trying to work out how much I spent last month and see that the only way is to run a campaign report and then use a calculator to add up the costs for each - very poor - definitely needs to be improved.
5. Just discovered that whilst downloading my daily reports to my PDA - I can not open the files in the format used. Lets keep it to xls or cvs format.
6. Having set up reports to tell me yesterday's cost I am finding that for example the data for the 1st July arrives on the 3rd July. This really isn't good enough because on the morning of the 3rd I want costs from the 2nd not the 1st. I find now that I have to log into AdCenter and that the reports aren't that useful for monitoring my costs.
7. When a user logs into Adcenter and is presented with "Summary of Campaigns" it is natural to want to quickly set a date range so as one can see the amount of spend per campaign for say "yesterday" or the "month to date". This is easily done in Adwords and should always be a 5 sec operation, enabling the user to get a feel for what is happening with the account. At present Adcenter does not allow this, the only spend total is for all time and really this is low down the priority of data needs to know on a day to day basis. In fact if you have to go to another main tab, namely "Reports" to access this required information. The problem that a user then encounters is the need to run a report, and then maybe have to click forward a few pages to get to the data they want. Then if the user needs to lower some bids they have to log into each order individually - saving for each one. Users are generally used to Adwords where they would say change bids in 5 adgroups based on yesterday's data in a few clicks - quickly clicking through each one. To do the same task in Adcenter is firstly not logical and secondly can take 5 times the amount of time (and if you don't believe just try it - it has to be the most frustrating thing I do online). Adcenter needs to integrate the data range into the main Campaign tab.
8. When running reports please remove the graphs that occur above the data. A survey of users will show that although they may look pretty and slick in the way they appear they serve no other purpose. This is because when you have say more than 10 orders for arguements sake, it is impossible to read the x and y axis and interpret the information properly. There should be a preference to turn these graphs off as they use valuable screen space and give nothing in return.
9. This relates to "point 7" but is so important that it needs special mention here. Imagine the current situation I am now have. I want to lower the majority of bids in most of my orders in a specific campaign. Before I even begin I am frustrated because I don't have the information from yesterday's spend readily available - I'm trying to remember data from when I viewed it 2 mins ago. If I click in to "Keyword Performance" and change some bids I have to hit "save" - even this bit is guest work because I have overall positions but no data on current monthly or daily positions - so how much do I lower or higher a bid by to get the position I want - I am basically in the dark. Anyway after hitting "Save" I have to acknowledge it has been saved within a pop up (MSN please note this is not neccessary and adds to ever increasing number of clicks). So now I want to edit the next order's bids - where is the "Next" or "Prev" button? There is none I have to click on the "Order List" and scroll or click through several pages to find the next "order" - this can add another few clicks and say another 20 - 60 seconds. By the time you get to the bids you want to lower or higher you can easily have lost your train of thought because frustration has set in. I am not exaggerating when changing bids in 20 orders has taken me around 40 minutes - in adwords it would take 5 minutes at the most. Resolving this issue should be the Most Important thing MSN Adcenter work on - NOTHING can be more critical in reducing the amount of time they are asking their users to spend on basic tasks - especially when their competitor allows you to it in 10- 15% of the time
-- Please add to this list if you come across anything that needs to be improved within MSN Adcenter. So as MSN can read a full and complete list of improvements at any given time. In fact it would be great if an representative could comment on each.
[edited by: Receptional at 2:41 pm (utc) on July 4, 2006]
[edit reason] (Merged double posting) [/edit]
it tells me that the @hotmail.com portion of the email address is "reserved".
I think that means it is already populated for you...? Maybe not
I have to be able to move faster than this. My client's business and their competitors move faster than this. I hope it's going to get better.
Looking at the message headers, it looks like everyone I've been talking to has their Reply To field set as blank.
I have noticed this in bCentral correspondence for the past few months. The problem seems to be in their help desk email software, where the Reply-To: field is enabled in the replies but is blank, so many novice users will be left wondering how to reply. In bCentral, the email address is so long that one wonders if it will reach a human if you copy and paste it before sending.
There is a May post by eWhisper that gives more detail about the bug-fixing processes behind the scenes in such large companies.
On one of my other accounts, I've had half my ads and words disapproved, but there's no consistency whatsoever between the ones that were approved and the ones that weren't. I have to fill out lengthy appeals, and it's been ten days and I haven't even heard back on the first one yet. Meantime, there are people advertising on my (rejected but highly relevant) healthcare-related keywords, advertising healthcare-word RINGTONES, and by the way, it appears you can also buy healthcare-word on eBay, too.
I guess I can get a premium account with an account rep, but not until I spend $10k month. But I can't spend $10k month till I can get my clients up and running.
What's wrong with this picture?
Netmeg--that username issue is absolutely ridiculous.
"There's no reason you should be getting that error message"
This is so beyond ridiculous.
