Your campaigns may undergo an editorial audit

[LeoXIV]

hhh, i just received an email from AdCenter that my campaigns 'may' undergo an editorial audit. Is this based on what? a random audit?

PS: earlier in the day , there was another email welcoming me to 'contents' network. :)

[edited by: LeoXIV at 1:39 am (utc) on Jan. 18, 2007]

[rehabguy]

Yeah, we got the same email today. Kind of funny if you ask me.

Somebody needs to provide an editorial audit of MSN's serps.

[LeoXIV]

maybe i should start deleting those paused campaigns, they make my account look huge!

[inbound]

We got one too, although we have over 600,000 different landing pages. They should have fun reviewing those!

I'm not worried about the reviews, as long as someone with a brain does them, after all we complain when we see things that aren't right. MSN are just trying to improve standards.

Remember, there's always a chance that a manual review, if positive, could improve your relevance score.

[meybaud35mm]

Definitely unusual.

[spc90210]

I received this as well. Anybody else?

I'm a little concerned that there may be negative repurcussions. I have MANY keywords, but I spend hours and hours and hours making sure that every keyword is targeted. I'm concerned MSN may just say "too many keywords" and drop the hammer on me.

We shall see...

[guyguy10]

I received one to and as of this morning (Friday) none of my ads are running.

[adCenter411]

Hi everyone,
To clarify the emails some of you have received – in order to provide Live Search users with content that matches their search query, adCenter analyzes your site and sections of your ad, and then compares them to your keywords for relevance. Your current campaigns may undergo an additional review to ensure that your ads and keywords meet adCenter editorial guidelines. If your campaigns do not pass the audit, you may receive valid editorial rejections for your ads or keywords. If you disagree with these rejections, you can appeal by contacting our Support team.

I hope this helps - please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks!
adCenter411

[jcmoon]

"3,467 of 5000+ keywords did not meet editorial guidelines."

AdCenter needs an easier way to see the reasons KWs were rejected. When I log in, only 3 of the KWs were 'rejected.'

Still along way to go here..

[spc90210]

Ever since I received an email indicating that an editorial audit may be coming, I've been receiving a constant stream of "rejected keyword" emails.

ALL of my keywords are extremely targeted and hand-vetted. Several of my campaigns have overall CTR's in the 1.5% to 2.5% range. But I believe in targeting long-tail keywords (targeted ones!). I think this is where I've gotten into trouble.

My campaigns had been completely stable for many months. I created one new campaign with a large number of keywords (my largest campaign ever). Seems like it was the influx of keywords for this campaign that caused all my problems. Within 72 hrs, I'm subject to editorial audit. Keywords in all of my campaigns continue to be disabled day after day. I nuked the new campaign, hoping that would stop the assault. Alas, it continues.

Soon, more than 50% of my keywords will be disabled with no end in sight. These campaigns ran for MANY months with high CTR's and only a very small number of rejected keywords.

Anyone else experiencing this?

I highly recommend everyone be careful when submitting large numbers of keywords; you may get slapped, as I have.

[inbound]

It's not the long tail that is the problem. As stated before, we have over 600,000 keywords live (with 600,000 tailored landing pages). The rejection emails have started to come in, so far we seem to be getting 1 from every 7,500 rejected. I've still to investigate further, but I think it's more likely to be an occasional page delivery problem that has caused the rejection (we get hit really hard by the ad bots, AdWords YSM and AdCenter, so if YSM is being particularly badly behaved we can fail to deliver the odd page).

We have had a couple of smaller campaigns come back with more rejections, and I have to say I agree with the results. We probably would have deleted the suspended words on the next ROI sweep anyway, so I'd say it's working well (for us, I appreciate that other may be experiencing problems that seem odd).

The best advice I can give you is to have the target keyword in the body text on the landing page. If you don't at least mention the specific search term then you are leaving yourself wide open to automatic flags being raised. Also, you should make sure that keywords are closely synonymous to the main subject of your ad/landing page (stray too far and a manual reviewer may have difficulty recognising the relevance, you know your business much better than any reviewer so make it easy for them to see the relevance - if they can see it so can your potential customers).

Remember that this is about forcing people to 'be more relevant', it's not the same as Google forcing minimum bids up. This is a simple, honest (although possibly flawed for some) suspension of keywords that do not appear to be relevant enough. There are plenty of other things that I would like AdCenter to address before this though, like giving us decent tools to actually manage large numbers of keywords.

[biking4jesus]

got the same email and I have yet to see any ads or keywords be flagged during the review.