Forum Moderators: werty
As many of you know we’ve recently started a pilot of MSN’s new search advertising product, MSN adCenter, in the US. I’m writing today on behalf of the adCenter Product Management team to reach out to the WebmasterWorld community so that we can get your feedback on how we’re doing and what you’d ideally like to see from us during the pilot and after launch. Specifically, we’re looking at how we can offer a set of compelling services to our self-service advertisers. Do you want campaign optimization? A quick migration tool? What about an ad certification program? If you were to name the top 5 services you could have, what would they be? Let us know! We’ll be reading this thread.
We’d also like to meet with you. If you are willing to chat with a member of our team – sticky mail us and we’ll set something up.
If you are interested in participating in the pilot, please sign-up here (this link is exclusive to WebmasterWorld and referrals will be closely reviewed :):
[advertising.msn.com...]
Cheers,
The MSN adCenter Team
Change to the Geographic Targeting:
The options for selecting countries work well, but it would be nice to be able to target specific states and/or regions within the US.
It would also be nice to have the Cities organized under the state the cities are located in. I had to search through each city listed one by one to make sure I had selected all of the cities within California... A big pain the arse!
The entire system is very unfriendly for users. I've spent the last 3 days uploading and creating the 8 user accounts for our clients who wanted to go live and test the beta version. It's an incredibly slow and painful process. I was able to make submissions to 7 different search engines (business.com, miva, enhance, quigo, mygeek, kellysearch, & findology) in the same amount of time that it took me to create a single order and add in 50 keywords.
The bulk-upload system is not even worth the time because you still have to manually create the campaigns, the orders, then create separate spreadsheets for the ads and the keywords. It needs to be condensed into a single bulk-upload spreadsheet where the user has the import options of replacing or updating the entire contents of the current campaign.
I guess that might cause problems since sometimes it's almost a week before you can even pull a report to see how the campaigns are doing, but I hope that it's something that MSN is looking at adding in the future.
It's great we can import campgains with lots of keywords, but it's nearly impossible to manage sets of keywords. i might have an order with 500 keywords and I want to update the bids and/or paramaters on 40 of them. right now, you have to individually go to eacn one and manually change stuff. wouldn't it be great if we could just upload the changes?
- Default to U.S. rather than Singapore as the location on all new campaigns. It's a pain to change another control - target your 99% user base
- Provide a total when I do a report on the Billing & Budget Summary and don't make it so hard to get to. Maybe show yesterday's total spend when you first enter the reports section.
- Get rid of all the "post backs", requiring a wait - use hidden divs or ajax instead
Keep the reports up to date. My reports are still 2-3 days delayed. I used to think that Yahoo was bad by being 1 day behind. Come on MSN.. lets get our act together. I know it's in beta but you're getting close to full launch.
let me know how it works for you.
thanks,
adCenter411
And is anyone at MSN actually reading the emails. I asked to talk to a rep to help with with the issue above and this is what I got (annoying):
adCenter has launched.
Thank you for your interest in advertising with MSN. We look forward to working with you to meet your online advertising needs.
MSN adCenter is an exciting new platform designed to meet all of your search advertising needs. Search is one of the most measurable ways to spend your advertising dollars. With adCenter, you can target ads by age, gender, geography, time of day and day of week to more effectively reach your audience. In addition, adCenter’s robust keyword research tools show who is searching on what terms – so you can learn before you every pay for a click!
Please visit: [advertising.msn.com...] to register.
Again, thank you for your inquiry. We look forward to enabling your search advertising needs in the coming months.
Learn more about adCenter at: [advertising.msn.com...]
Also, I'd like to be able to navigate from one order to the next within a campaign when I am editing without going back to the campaign list. For example, you could add "Next Order" and "Previous Order" navigation buttons at the top of the order pages.
I'd also like a list to stay sorted (even if I navigate away and then come back) after I've sorted it. For example, I will sort the orders in a campaign by CTR, work on an order and then go back to the main list. The main list goes back to the default order. I'd like it to remain in the sorted order unless I navigate away from that campaign or log out.
MOST OF ALL, we still need better reporting. We need close to real-time reporting and easier report generation.
Would you believe that when I told the MSN AdCenter rep that I thought a big company would not have the obstacles and the roadblocks and the lack of response that we experience as a small company and I was told: "WE TREAT ALL COMPANIES THE SAME! IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW BIG A COMPANY YOU ARE, YOU GET THE SAME LEVEL OF SERVICE"
Maybe I'm just too naive.
While addding keywords to an order, and displaying the match types - all words are set to broad match
The only way to change is to manually go thru each word - how about adding a check box to select broad, phrase, or exact for ALL the words in the order, so as not to require you to select match type for each individual keyword?
