MSN Adcenter Support and System Woes

In December I received the chance to to join the MSN adCenter quicklaunch program. This program allowed a small group of people to test out the upcoming MSN search advertising program before it went into a full beta program. As a part of the quicklaunch I was designated an adCenter representative to facilitate the set up process. It was a good thing that I had help or I would have never gotten my account up and running. I had a series of quirky issues getting my username and password accepted which took multiple emails, phone calls, and only ended when J. (my adCenter rep) created an account for me out of frustration. However, once things were up and running I was pleased with the quality and price of the traffic I received and added additional campaigns to my account to take further advantage of the program.

Fast Forward to late April/early May. While doing some checking on my account I decided to look over one of the campaigns originally set up by quicklaunch. I had only looked it over briefly when it went live at the end of December and wanted to compare this campaign to some that I had set up since. Most notably, I was curious if I would see any “rejected” keywords since in campaigns I have set up adCenter has rejected a rather large percentage of them. I didn’t find many rejected keywords but what I found was quite surprising. The quicklaunch representative had set up multiple campaigns for me for different websites/markets. In one campiagn (hypotheticaly for auto insurance) I found my most productive order was full of keywords that were intended for MP3 players. (again - hypothetically) I was quite frustrated to see that the two ads for the order went to the two different sites, used the same keywords and yet there were no more than 5 rejected keywords for either ad. In other words, my order was sending people who saw an ad for auto insurance to my MP3 site in addition to sending MP3 interested people to my auto insurance site!
I called adCenter support which was a chore in itself since the help information kept pointing me to a page that was supposed to have a contact number that didn’t have any information on it. After a bit of sleuthing I found a number and spoke with a very friendly adCenter support person. S. was very friendly but didn’t strike me as being very familiar with the system. I had to basically explain to S. some of the features of the program (really!) and was informed by S. that she was not really sure how a particular function worked. At least S. created a ticket for me explaining the problem and assured me that I would hear back soon as to:

• how they could quickly and easily fix the account for me to save me time and hassle.
• whether they could refund some or all of my campaign spend since it was clearly not sending users to the type of information it was supposed to.

Now, I fully admit that I should have been more careful in looking over the campaigns set up by J. the quicklaunch representative, but it didn’t seem like I was asking a lot to have adCenter support fix the problem for me and to refund some money. Well, I’ve been wrong before.

Coming Up Soon - adCenter Woes Pt 2