Update: You can now get a $50 Microsoft Adcenter promotional credit when you sign up.
MSN AdCenter was a bit late to the PPC game and had a lot of catching up to do. I think they rolled out a decent product and have a few features that set it apart, namely targeting. The biggest problem with them is market share.
MSN AdCenter Pros:
- They offer demographic targeting that allows you to specify spending increases depending on sex, age, income.
- Quality of traffic seems pretty high
MSN AdCenter Cons:
- Response times to stopping or pausing campaigns are notoriously bad.
- Pretty low volume of searches overall in their system
When I first started the campaign I was advertising women’s jewelry so I set “-man, -boy, -cheap, …” keywords as negatives right in the same list of keywords. Well, it turns out MSN has a negative keyword matching system that’s completely separate from the rest of the keyword system and they ignore any minus signs in the keyword list, taking the word as a keyword instead.
So over a course of about 4 days, I had jewelry ads running for “play boy” and “man love”. It was coincidentally during a weekend when they were upgrading their system so it was down all of that Saturday. So the time for me to notice this in the analytics, plus the time before I was able to login and correct this, plus the time it took for them to change it over (like I said – slow response times) – added up to about 4 days of really untargeted ads and wasted money.
- PPC Network Overview
- Part 1: Google AdWords
- Part 2: Yahoo Search Marketing
- Part 3: MSN AdCenter
- Part 4: Looksmart
- Part 5: Adbrite
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Can you post the URL where you signed up for AdCenter? Last I looked, I couldn’t find it on the website…
It’s: https://adcenter.microsoft.com/