How long does it take for Adwords to go live

[tbp]

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Signed up for an adcenter account today, and really not very impressed to far!

Had the problem with wasting time on trying to get discount codes generated by the tryadcenter website to work, when Microsoft are aware that it only generates expired codes which are useless, but don't see fit to issue a warning or take the site down.

I signed up at lunchtime, and was expecting things to go live this afternoon, but they still aren't.

It was displaying the "Credit check" status until 9pm, even though the credit card payment of £5 went through fine at around 12pm. The campaign was stuck on default status, now it's showing active but all the keywords are inactive.

Seems very unfriendly, haven't had a single email from them since I set up the account, nothing telling me the status changed from default to active, and I`ve got no idea why the keywords are still inactive, and how long they are going to be inactive for.

Really tempted to give up and just stick to adwords! Been dissapointed at how slow and clunky the site has been compared to adwords as well. Expected better from Microsoft!

[mainlime]

Sounds about par for the course. MS AdCenter sucks. The interface is abysmally slow, to the extent that it locks up all the other tabs I have open on Firefox. They frequently, randomly decline keywords only to reinstate them when I query it. They sent me 17 emails the other day telling me that campaigns had been suspended but when I logged in they were all running fine. And on top of that they seem to have bugger all inventory to sell in the first place.

The only positive about AdCenter is that you can at least get hold of someone in the UK on the phone. In fact, they seem a bit too keen to call and I've had to ask them in the past to email instead as it's more convenient for me.

EDIT: One other advatage came to mind. If you have campaigns on Adwords you want to run on MSN, you can export them as CSV from Google Adwords Editor and then import them straight into MSN. It doesn't work properly (at least in Firefox) but it does 95% of the work.

[tbp]

Thanks for the details. Didn't know about the csv export from Adwords to Adcenter.

Copied the data over manually, which wasn't too bad it will definately be easier in future.

My ad's have now finally got live, 14 hours after i`ve created them, so it will be interesting to see how they done.

Overall, im not impressed with them, it's been a disapointing experience compared to adwords. Considering what they do, you would of thought the interface would be much better, seems very slow and clunky compared to adwords.

Did annoy me that they don't take debit cards as well, as I hate using credit cards. With debit cards I can only spend what I have, and don't want to fall into the credit card trap (again! and took me around 8 years to get out of it).

Still it seems to be working now. Very suprised by the lack of communication, never known anywhere before where you set up and account and don't get some sort of email confirming it. Would have been handy to get an email when the ad's went live as well, instead of keep having to check back.

[mainlime]

Just to prove my points: I set up a campaign yesterday, logged in to check it today and all but a handful of keywords have been disapproved. Phoned the support line and was told that the keywords had been rejected by their automated system and they would need to lodge a review request which could take up to five days!

The problem is that these keywords are all misspellings of the main keyword. This is a widely used, standard practice in CPC advertising and they're rejecting them out of hand. Crazy.

[ian-d]

G, you put 'adwords' in your title, rather than 'adcenter'

From what i know adcenter is manually checked and approved so can sometimes take weeks to get even a single keyword through. Total waste of time imho.

[tbp]

G, you put 'adwords' in your title, rather than 'adcenter'

Thank you, i`m an idiot lol - Not thinking straight at the moment, headaches getting worse I`ve changed the title now.

I did get everything going last night in the end, took a while after the keywords went active before the ad's started showing. Did put in over 500 keywords, so don't think they were all manually checked.

So far though it's been incredibly disappointing, actually more expensive than adwords to get my ad in the same position. My ad is displayed on every search, but today the impressions on ad center have been 2% of my google adwords impressions, and 0 clicks.

[mainlime]

And now they've rejected a load of credit card related keywords as being "gambling related". The sheer randomness of it all is bizarre!

[tbp]

I`ve had zero impressions today, even though my ad is in top spot, only one has been me checking.

Compare that to over 300 on Google Adwords.

Knew there was obviously less searches than Google, but didn't expect it to be so bad, really quite dissapointing.

[Dazza30]

I must admit adcenter is frustrating, i was expecting decent results from it .But after months of trying with popular keywords and at a higher cost ive gone back to adwords.

I hope miscrosoft can get their hands on yahoo, it could create something able to compete with google and may be of some benefit to us all.

[tbp]

I hope miscrosoft can get their hands on yahoo, it could create something able to compete with google and may be of some benefit to us all.

I don't know, they've ballsed up totally with Adcenter, so I don't see how they can do much better really.

I`ve now had a huge 21 impressions, 2 clicks and spent a massive 14p, for 8 days on Adcenter. Compare that to over 200 clicks on Google, both ad's are in the same position on each search engine.

I did used to think fairly highly of Microsoft, despite their faults, but I think they have really dropped the ball the last couple of years in all areas. Vista is nothing really new, and a basic rehash of windows XP which has taken them 7 years to write, and still has massive amounts of problems. MSN search and Adcenter seem to be nothing in the world of web searches, they just seem to be getting everything wrong lately.

I don't know if their money and success have gone to their heads and they are getting complacent now, but in terms of developement they aren't a patch on Google.

[elizabeth]

Really tempted to give up and just stick to adwords! Been dissapointed at how slow and clunky the site has been compared to adwords as well. Expected better from Microsoft!

Have you tried posting your feedback on the adCenter Community site? Whether you’re an adCenter Advertiser, using adCenter Analytics or developing through the adCenter API, Microsoft adCenter Community is the place to get adCenter updates, tips & tricks, and to have questions answered or share experiences with other users. One encouraging thing is that adCenter has improved since it launched and is getting better.

[tbp]

Hi Elizabeth,

Thanks for answering. I don't actually think anything is going "wrong" as such with my ad. It's displaying in first place each time the key phrase is searched on, but after 4 weeks now it has only had 46 impressions, and 12 clicks.

Looking at my Google adwords stats for the same period, for the same advert also displaying in position 1, it's had 6903 impressions and 454 clicks.

So the click through rate is actually better on MSN adcenter, but the search volume is a tiny fraction of what i`m getting on google. I knew when I signed up to MSN that the volume would be much less than Google, I just didn't realise how little it would be ie 0.75% of the Google impressions.

In 4 weeks i`ve spent 85p on MSN!

Obviously happy with the click through rate on MSN, but its the number of impressions thats the problem, and I don't see how they can do anything about that, short of getting a lot more people to use it as their search engine.