Is Adcenter any good?

Mike_M · 27-10-06

Just wondering what peoples thoughts are on the performance of MSN Adcenter when compared to other PPC engines?

Personally I thought Adcenter was great for the first couple of months, great ROI and a decent-looking interface with useful reporting features. However, my opinion has now changed somewhat as I am faced with:

- Conflicting reasons for why ads are approved/rejected, seemingly dependent on who you speak to at MSN, which baffles me!
- Strange reasons for ad rejection, which sort of ties in with the first point.
- Sharp decline in ROI (the competition has apparently caught on)
- Conversion tracking not matching up with my own stats
- A couple of days recently where the reporting was clearly wrong but no notification of a problem until I queried their call centre about it
- A limit on the number of negative keywords permitted
- Cumbersome editorial review process

It may seem like I hate adcenter from what I have said so far, but I do still prefer it to YSM, I like the interface and the reports (when they work!) and for a while it produced great results with a better ROI than Google.

I now feel however that the honeymoon period is over - now far too much of my time is spent on the phone to them querying their reasons for rejected ads/keywords, their requests for ridiculous alterations to my landing pages - I would like to add new keywords and grow my campaigns but at the moment it's just such a hassle to do. It reminds me of the old Overture problems - difficult to get motivated to add new keywords and ads when you know 90% will be rejected and you'll end up spending ages on the phone trying to explain why your ads should be approved.

Anyone else's thoughts? In particular, has anyone found a way around their negative keyword limit? It currently stands at 1022 characters. To maximise my ROI I need to add about 500 excluded words.

Murray Newlands · 27-10-06

I agree with you Mike. The honeymoon period does seem to be over. Was great for the first few weeks, when there was little competition, but things are different now. The interface is better than Yahoo Overture's but worse than Google Adwords.

steveaich · 27-10-06

I never got past adding my first 4 or 5 campaigns. My time is much better spent in google. Why bring something to market which is worse than your biggest competitor?

Out of those campaigns the ROI has been pretty constant, it just takes too long to wade through the interface, let alone wade through and then have to argue about why the ad is relevant/been rejected.

Mike_M · 30-10-06

Has anyone else had issues with ad rejection?

Shane · 30-10-06

It's the most annoying interface I've ever used and I've been in plenty of crappy two bit search engine interfaces before

the word multi task is missing from msn's vocabularly obivously, it lives in one window, it takes 5 clicks to do anything when it could take one, it has javascript confirmation buttons which take the focus off anything else you may be doing in another browser or monitor.

I added 750 keywords to a campaign last night, it took me about 15-20 minutes to manually create and add all the keywords, max limit at any one time is 200 so you add them, then if there are any dupes you have to tick each one, then you have to set the matching options.. if you want 200 broad phrase and exact matched you need to manually tick 400 boxes to make that happen.

you click enter and it sets the bids at max bid for the main keywords, if you don't click the column ^ sort button you might miss some if they are on page two for some reason, you play with the bids and scenarios, finally set the bids and click enter and then go back round x more clicks again.. set matching options etc... such a pain

manual adding more than 20-50 keywords is a pain although having said that traffic is so poor that's probably more than enough

on the plus side much of what we've done has had a postive ROI .. but at very low volumes, in some cases not covering the wages it cost to create campaigns lol

early days still .. the new beta interface is much improved but still a pain and framed and annoying gaaaaahhh so frustrating

chrisuk · 31-10-06

I was fortunate to get my account running during the beta in June & July and hogging all the number one slots was great fun. As expected though coming out of beta mean't some competition.

Nothing wrong with that normally but sadly Adcenter does not have the traffic volume behind it to deliver many clicks once your position slumps to the second, third & fourth serp pages even on the most competitive of words. Adwords in comparison can deliver substantial clicks on these inner pages because of its sheer traffic.

This means that although it seems like there is plenty of room on adcenter there actually isn't because there just isn't sufficient volume to provide high quantities of clicks unless you are on page one or two and competition has forced affiliates off many of these areas, finance sector for example.

The good news is that this is likely to change as I imagine improving volume is a big priority for them. However a distribution network when it comes has its own disadvantages, equally competition will continue to grow. Google has upset many people in recent months thus Adcenter is bound to take advantage of that.

The account interface is average, changing matchtypes is a pain, its not rocket science to place some 'check all' boxes surely? I recommend using the spreadsheet facility to upload keywords and set match types, much quicker. The dynamic keyword tools are also quite good and easy to understand.