MSN Search - Painful

[Luke]

Does anyone else find MSN search marketing really painful to use = horribly slow, times out and they seem to take an eternity to approve stuff.

Is this really Microsoft - couldn't they have done a better job than this?!

cheers

Luke

[Scorpioncart]

Is this really Microsoft - couldn't they have done a better job than this?!

IE6 - IE7 - IE8 - Vista!!
So I guess not

[tbp]

Yes, i`ve found it really slow as well, and not really worth bothering with.

Still haven't managed to spend £1 yet in 4 weeks of advertising - as much as im into saving money, I do actually want to give it to them!

[Dazza30]

Ive managed to spend £4.96 in two days, with 20 clicks and 406 impressions it is slow but ive seen some conversions from it.

I hope it improves as ive just started to get quality score problems in my adwords account, and it doesnt make sense!

[tbp]

These are my stats for adcenter vs google

Adcenter: After 4 weeks now at number 1 spot my advert has only had 46 impressions, and 12 clicks.

Google: For the same advert also displaying in position 1, and same time period, it's had 6903 impressions and 454 clicks.

[Dazza30]

I spoke to soon adcenter is incredibly slow today, adwords isnt much better either.

[chrisuk]

Adcenter is not worth if at the moment, these are the main probs

1. Too much competition on the tasty keywords and not nearly enough traffic to go around.

2. Slow - and I mean really dog slow and unresponsive. This can be overcome if you are say just marketing 1-2 products but if you are a retailer or comparison site needing lots of ads and keyword strategies then it is going to make you wince.

3. Totaly farked editorial systems, seemingly random rejection of ads and keywords meaning work constantly has to be redone. Combine points 2-3 and you have a deadly recipe.

4. Non implementation of many no brainers - why does it take hours to pause/restart ads, elementary ommissions in the GUI.

5. Dreadful non intutative billing system, card declines are a pita to get restarted, invoices drive my acountant barmy and so on...

In summary the work involved set against the reward will be in many cases not really worth it. My view is that it is hard enough to get traffic volume as it is these days without the interface dragging it even further behind.

There are tier 3 ppcs that have better user interfaces and deployment options out there. What gets me is that so many suggested improvements are just common sense but they don't take any notice. You would also think that given the difficulties that many are experiencing in Adwords that they would move heaven and earth to exploit this to build inventory but it seems not.

[tbp]

Totaly farked editorial systems, seemingly random rejection of ads and keywords meaning work constantly has to be redone.

I had a wierd one, the work "ex" was banned straight away for some reason.

[Shane]

it's so bad, I think there's only Frostie that loves it, but it really winds the hell out of me, it's as though all the MSN search development team had all their money in yahoo and google shares when they built it

they must have sat down and said.. "right how can we feck this up, let's design a system so frustrating, inept and completely useless that people just won't bother and will stick with yahoo and google"

hopefully it will evolve into something useable .. eventually

[tbp]

I don't know whats happening with these big companies, they all see to be losing the plot when it comes to designing new systems, even Google is getting worse.

Not sure if they are just getting complacent now because they have total market dominance, and feel that they don't need to make so much of an effort now.

[Dazza30]

Originally Posted by tbp Not sure if they are just getting complacent now because they have total market dominance, and feel that they don't need to make so much of an effort now.

I think your right theyve become complacent, especially google i think theyve totaly lost the plot with adwords.

I joined upto their own forums today and was totaly amazed by the amount of people struggling with the quality score issue.

When a question was asked about it a moderator would reply and refer you to the quality score help section which is less than vague, you can never get a straight answer.

What also amazed me was that there's an obvious google cliche who respond to threads and give the impression that you should feel honoured to use google at all and should shut up and not complain, after all because of google your earning some money.

I wont be going back

[tbp]

I was listening to a Podcast the other, from someone who has close contact with the people at Google.

He asked them why they didn't make it clear to their users exactly what they were looking for in terms of the quality score. Their answer was that they didn't know themselves, and there were very few people at Google who did.

They also said the recent Google slap was a "technical glitch"