Adcenter Accounts Suddenly Stopped Spending

Adcenter campaigns suddenly stop with no news of editorial punishment.

[jtron9k]

In the last few days several of our adcenter accounts have suddenly stopped generating spend. These are accounts with hundreds of adgroups and thousands of keywords. It's a sudden issue, but I suspect its somehow related to the migration. My reps have said they have other clients facing similar issues, but I can't find anything on the forums about it.

My server logs show short bursts of traffic for maybe an hour in the early morning and then not a single impression the rest of the day. Bids are not the issue, as I've tested raising some bids to 400% of their current levels and the ads still aren't showing.

So anyone else see a similar issue with adcenter? This transition seems to be a disaster so far...

[rustybrick]

Hmmm, does this help or Microsoft is clueless? [community.microsoftadvertising.com...]

[jtron9k]

rustybrick,

Thanks for the reply. I've also seen that post, but it doesn't seem to help. We created a new account and ported over the existing campaigns and the new account doesn't seem to have the same trouble. The bids are exactly the same in the new one. Very odd. In Microsoft's defense, this adcenter / yahoo migration is probably the biggest systems integration project of the last ten years. There will surely be issues.

Our rep did say other accounts are experiencing the same issues, but its shocking to me how threads exist online about the issue.

[bluemoose]

Almost exact same situation here - thousands of impressions daily until Oct 26, then nothing. I've talked to two "escalation managers" and they are aware of the problem.

First person said that starting this week, and occurring "randomly and intermittently", some accounts have their Ad Distribution setting set to "Not Set" internally, basically pausing all ad groups and campaigns in the account. This can be seen in the Medium column on the Ads tab. Manually setting ad distribution to Search Network or other in Settings does not fix the problem. Another manager told me to export all my ads and then re-import them in as a workaround. This did not work. Set my bids to 10X normal - this does not work. Saw a single impression in one campaign yesterday - quickly verified that the ad dist setting went to "Search Network". Checked again an hour later and it reverted back to "Not Set". This is so lame.

I manage my own campaigns and those for my clients and this has easily cost couple grand in lost leads and sales. No known estimate to fix this and my contact has taken the day off and won't be in until Monday. The person is refusing to answer or respond back to my calls.

This is a multi-billion, world-class company? These people don't seem to have any real sense of urgency or concern that there are real people whose livelihoods depend on using their products and services. It's like the Keystone Cops on the job. And of course we are going into the weekend and so everybody is off until Monday. Highly frustrating.

See this thread: [community.microsoftadvertising.com...]

[TerryZule]

Exactly the same problem with us. We used to spend between $300-$500 dollars a day with Yahoo! using the Panama System. This Monday the 25th the transition was completed, and Tuesday morning we were spending half of our normal amounts. Then downward through the week.

BOTH of our accounts have ZERO traffic Friday morning. Both accounts are "Premium Accounts" so we have a "special manager" who was ALSO OFF WORK FRIDAY!

So here we sit willing to spend up to $30,000 a month with them and they leave us high and dry for 3 days. We have lost thousands of dollars in revenue.

#*$!s.

Terry

[RhinoFish]

under the distribution settings within your search ad groups, do you have it set to M&Y only, M&Y&Others or Others only?

make sure you've expanded your M budget to allow for the new ceiling.

any avg position changes?

[Praxus]

This happened to me too. All my campaigns simply stopped running and the distribution setting on my ads now say 'not set'. I can't believe its taking them so long to fix this! Losing $$$ a day in revenue. I created a new account and replicated the campaigns and its running; but with nowhere near the traffic my old ones were getting before they stopped.

[jtron9k]

Good to see some conversation starting to flow about this issue. Here is what I've noticed so far.

1. I haven't seen the "medium" issue in any of our accounts. Distribution is set just fine. However, there could be an interface glitch or something where my medium is "not set" despite it saying "search network"
2. We're getting much less volume in adcenter now than in Y! and adcenter combined pre merger at similar bids. I don't have the balls to double or triple the bids for a day and see what happens, but perhaps the predicted increases in average CPC by position post integration are larger than I would have thought.
3. I haven't seen one instance of someone claiming to get more volume in adcenter now than in adcenter and Yahoo combined pre integration.
4. Partner network distribution seems relatively constant. I'd be curious if you guys have seen anything different.

This is a major bummer for everyone except Google. Maybe I did something wrong with the transition, but I'm willing to bet I didn't do anything ill advised.

[Erku]

I thought I would update this from a Publisher point of view on Microsoft. We have seen huge decline in ad revenue, CTR and CPM.

Things were so bad that we had suspended the program for the time being.

Anyone sees improvement?

With the same traffic, our earnings dropped from 200-250 a day to 25-30 dollars.

[Tina Kelleher]

Hi All,

I just wanted to jump in and let you guys know that this issue has been identified and resolved by our tech support team. I just received word that a fix was deployed and they're in the process of verifying that delivery has been restored for those affected.

If you're still having issues, please let me know (post here, in the advertiser forums, [community.microsoftadvertising.com ] or send a tweet to @adCenter) so I can follow up with you directly.

Thanks!

Tina Kelleher
adCenter Community Manager

[TerryZule]

REALLY! Resolved!

I'm on the fourth day of ZERO traffic and our business has been destroyed. Time to put the house up for sale I suppose, cause if this is what "resolved" looks like, you apparently don't want a single penny of my $70,000 monthly budget for PPC".

Now let's talk about the lack of customer support now. I called three different reps and NONE of them were in today. Our manager has been out since Thursday and not into today at all. No-one by phone - no email to explain status and what is going on. Pathetic.

Still NO TRAFFIC. And don't tell me this has to do with the quality of the ads or the landing pages. There are dozens of landing page URLS I could send you that have little to no valuable content and all advertising and they ARE getting traffic.

We are selling actual products. NO ADVERTISING on our landing pages!

Totally PISSSSSSSEDDDD OFFFFF!

Good work MSN.

[Tina Kelleher]

Hi Terry,

Thanks for letting me know, I just sent you a message requesting your adCenter account number so I can get it in front of the teams responsible for investigating this issue.

Thanks!

[Praxus]

Just checked; still 0 impressions today.

[jtron9k]

Tina,

Could you clarify on what you mean by the issue being identified?

[Tina Kelleher]

Hi jtron,

I just meant that it was something the support team had deployed a fix for, as opposed to something that was still an ongoing investigation, or an "open" issue.

Unfortunately it seems that the fix is not helping all customers and so further investigation is needed. For the time being, the best thing anyone experiencing this issue can do is contact support:
[community.microsoftadvertising.com...]

Doing so will allow our staff to take down your adCenter account information, which will help our tech support teams identify and resolve the issue for those who are still experiencing it.

Thanks!

[tennismaster1978]

Tina, I have already contacted support and they have no idea what is going on. I have little to no impressions since oct 25th!

[Tina Kelleher]

Hi tennismaster1978,

Thanks for calling support, that's absolutely the most helpful thing any advertiser can do at this point; the more detail the support staff has to work with, the closer they'll get to resolving this delivery issue.

If it's any consolation, as we "speak" I'm writing up a detailed report of the issues we're seeing both in this thread and in one on the MSA Community forums that will be escalated to managers across the support teams for visibility into how this is affecting our advertisers.

As soon as I have an update on this issue, I'll report back.

Thanks!

[Tina Kelleher]

Hi All,

I just wanted to check back in and let you all know that I checked in with our support staff and there are no open bugs being investigated right now. The only issue was a reporting issue that was resolved last week (the one I mentioned when I first posted).

The most common scenario we're seeing in relation to a drop in impressions is the result of advertisers hitting their budgets sooner than expected due to the increased volume now that the search alliance transition is complete. If you haven't hit your budgets and your ads are not serving, please contact our support staff so they can investigate: [community.microsoftadvertising.com...]

Thanks!
Tina Kelleher
adCenter Community Manager

[Praxus]

The medium setting on my ads now say "Search Network" again; but no impressions yet.

[jtron9k]

I worry this is an editorial punishment that they (adcenter) aren't necessarily being open about. It doesn't make any sense otherwise.

[Praxus]

If there were editorial reasons the CS people should know. Doing it 'secretly' so that not even the reps know if an account is flagged for quality reasons would be totally asinine. But not inconceivable, that's for sure.

[jtron9k]

To your point Praxus, you're absolutely correct. It does seem unlikely that there is a secret quality smack down happening. I'm being a little "tinfoil hat" and possibly jumping to conclusions. It just doesn't make sense to me that the same keywords, at the same bids would get significantly less volume with bing, yahoo, and the partner network under one umbrella than bing separate from yahoo and their partner network.

There is definitely truth to the differences in adcenter vs yahoo match types. Advanced match cast a much wider net than adcenter's broad match. So you definitely lose impressions moving from one to the other.

I believe groupM or efficient frontier did a large scale study on the implications of CPC increases once the integration happened and predicted CPCs would go up short term.

All said, this issue boils down to the following.

1. loss in volume to keyword gaps caused by match type differences.
2. loss in volume due to CPCs being higher, thus creating a higher barrier to entry for the auctions (both on Bing/Yahoo and the partner network).
3. Some sort of technical glitch with ads not being served.
4. A budget pacing issue.
5. A secret editorial penalty (unlikely, but still worth mentioning).

[TerryZule]

After numerous calls with many friendly and well meaning customer service reps I had different answers from all. It's turns out that my account was flagged as "low quality" (after 5 years of no interruption on Panama) and there was no alerts in the account at all. EVERYTHING shows active with no alerts on any parameter.

When we were getting ready for the transition we were told by different reps to add allot more keywords - THAT is what killed my account! Now trying to start over with a different account.

So you are NOT wearing a tin HAT! They are flagging accounts as "low quality" and then you are done!. It's not intuitive at all. No chance to clean up keyword lists, change ad copy, and improve landing pages either. JUST DONE! Unbelievable.

Even more frustrating is seeing other sites getting placement. These URLS are pure MFA. I have no problem with that, but make it fair for everyone!

wecanlend.com
sheridan-lending.com

Our sites have application forms which give leads to REAL banks and don't have Adsense anywhere.

What a total joke.

Terry

[edited by: Receptional at 1:33 pm (utc) on Nov 4, 2010]
[edit reason] Delinked the links [/edit]

[jNorth]

I wouldn't take these guys seriously and I wouldn't waste my time with ms. This last attempt was ultra fail, usually they fail a little slower. They are just noise, ignore them, and they will go away.

[TerryZule]

Yeah and top of that, unless you are a United States company or person, you won't see much traffic at all from USA IPs. They said that we would be able too, but we are being excluded.

AND all of the ad titles are lower case first letter. Looks like complete crap.

Ultra fail BIG TIME!

[Tropical Island]

My volume hasn't changed.

This whole thing is a waste of time & effort.
It did get me to cut the cord with Yahoo which is a positive.

[tennismaster1978]

My impressions are still way down and cpc is way up. #*$!! Have of my ads wont show up and none are showing in canada! Basically, I have lost yahoo search!

[Tina Kelleher]

Hi All,

Checking back in... if you have an SRX ID from an interaction with our support staff, please post it and I will follow up to see where they are in their investigation of your issue.

If you have not yet contacted support, please do so we can take a look at your account.

[community.microsoftadvertising.com...]

Thanks!

[jNorth]

Hi Tina,

I don't think anyone is interested.

[tennismaster1978]

Tina,
Here's a reference # they gave for my account. 1141693050