Problems with MSN Adcenter - Can anyone from MSN Help?

Lion · Joined: 29 Jan 2007 Posts: 3

So we signed up for msn adcenter last month and have been pretty happy with the results up until a couple of days ago when I noticed refferals from msn dropping.

Upon investigation on a particular term I saw we were appearing infrequently in the top 3 spots (the adcenter system reports impressions at number 1 spot). Sometimes we would appear at 1, sometimes at 3 and then most worryingly, we wouldnt appear at all! I notice other advertisers do rotate positions aswell, but they do not drop out altogether. As far as i can see our bid is high enough, our CTR is good and everything looks fine....which is why this is frustrating.

Just for clarification this is happening on various other terms aswell from a search on msn.co.uk or windows live.

This is something that has happened in the last few days and I have had some pretty generic and unhelpful responses from the support center. Being based in the UK I have no choice but to email support but this has not helped, I wonder if anyone on here (or from msn) can help us out?

We want to spend money on adcenter but the system isnt letting us!
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Angelica · Joined: 13 Feb 2008 Posts: 60

Here are just a few reasons why you should stay away from adCenter:
1. The Help documentation is not very helpful. All '?' bring you to the same help search page, instead of the actual topic you are looking for. Minor issue, but talk about a time waster!
2. The budget optimizer doesn't work and there has been no mention about it. One of the accounts I was testing, I put in $100 monthly budget for May, and 4 days in I've spent $45. Now they say you won't ever spend more then your budget but in a week, it will be depleted and my ads will be gone from MSN for the rest of the month.
3, 4, & 5. Keyword Reporting problems. First the UI is terrible, while you are looking at your keywords there is no date range selector to see yesterday's performance or a specific range, instead you have to change tabs and run a report. This sounds trivial but time is money and having to run a report just to look at yesterday's data is silly. Lag time in the data reporting is days instead of minutes. There are supposedly taking care of this problem by adding new server farms, but currently you have to run a report and look at it hourly in order to see any data outside of today's date. More UI problems, the layouts of the data being reported is not labeled very well. The previously mentioned hourly reports have a mysterious number range between 1 and 24, and not only are they not in order, they don't tell you what time zone it is for. (It's GMT for those curious).