Hi SEW Readers!

As many of you know we’ve recently launched the US pilot of MSN’s adCenter. The adCenter Product Management team would like your feedback on how we’re doing and what you’d like to see from us during the pilot and after launch. Our goal is to offer a set of awesome services and tools to our self-service advertisers. Do you want campaign optimization? A quick migration tool? What about an ad certification program? Let us know! We’ll be reading this thread and looking forward to your posts.

We’d also like to meet with you. If you are willing to chat with a member of our team – sticky mail us and we’ll set something up.

Right now participation in the MSN adCenter pilot is by invite only. You can register here to be considered for the pilot: http://advertising.msn.com/adCenterPilot/89621.asp

Cheers,
The MSN adCenter Team

PS – If you haven’t already seen it you can find answers to some of your posts here: http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=8364&page=2&pp=20

OK, I'll bite........ First off, I've had very good luck dealing with my MSN AdCenter team. Initially there was a learning curve for them and for me, but they've been nothing but helpful and responsive in trying to resolve some issues during startup, and in refining our account. I have no complaints about the customer service I've received.

That said, here are my suggestions:

1. Picky little thing, but the login page gives me a little error beep every time I hit "sign in." As if I've entered the wrong user name and password. I expect it now, but at first, it threw me and had me hitting the "back" button to re-enter the info. Picky, yet irritating. Get rid of the error beep on login!
2. The initial summary page is a nightmare of data and not at all pleasing to the eye, nor easy to figure out what I should do next. And, I didn't realize how few characters of each campaign and order name would show on this initial page, so I can't find what I'm looking for without searching. I see that I can rename campaigns, and orders, but I'll have to do it on a mass basis, probably thru my rep. Would have been nice to have had the layout specs ahead of time so I could have chosen more appropriate names right off the bat.
3. Overall the interface is very clunky and slow.
4. Reports. All in all a nice, customizable reports section. However, there is no option to run a report for "all time" except by selecting a custom report and manually selecting all the dates. Adding "all time" to the date range would help tremendously. Also consider adding a "this year" option.
5. Billing. We just received our first bill - in the mail, printed out, 5 pages worth. And it's just a printout of a report I could have run myself from the AdCenter. Couldn't this have been emailed to me, saving time, paper, and postage?
6. I have yet to see one of my ads live on msn.com. I know you're only serving a small % of impressions, but I've tried clearing my cache and asking others here in the office to look, and all we've ever seen is our Yahoo ads. I know they're running, because we're getting orders, but I'd really like to see them live for once.

OK that was a lot I guess! Hope this is the kind of feedback you were looking for. Overall our results have been good so far and I think once the learning curve slows a bit and the bugs are worked out this will be an excellent product.

Melissa

I'm back with more....

7. The "Delete Order" function is non-functional. "Pause Order" works, and has the same effect of stopping my ad from running. However, if there is a product I no longer carry, I'd like to just delete the ad instead of leaving it on pause. If the button is there, it should be working. If it doesn't work, remove it until it does work. :)

Melissa

I'm sure people would be happy to give feedback had anyone been let into the beta. I registered on 3 or 4 different occassions and never heard back at all... not even any news as to when it might be available.

I would have to second the above issues, and raise one myself. When I pull a Destination URL Activity report it would be a lot more beneficial to have the actual URL come up rather than "param1". Our backend tracking uses a code in the URL, which we use to combine the search campaign data with our in house data. Due to our large number of keywords and ads combining the two data reports by hand is pretty much out of the question. I would love to see that changed. Thanks.

Hi everyone,
Thank you for taking time to provide feedback. We are taking this feedback into account as we work on new versions of adCenter. We're constantly updating the system so we can provide the best user experience we can.

PPC - we are still reviewing applications, but unfortunately we can't respond to everyone. Right now we're only contacting invitees.

Thanks again for this great feedback - keep it coming!

--adCenter

Hey everybody,

Happy Friday…I just wanted to let you know that lots of adCenter folks are going to be at SES Chicago next week. Stop by the MSN booth in the expo if you want to have a live, face-to-face conversation with an actual adCenter person.

Some adCenter people will also be participating in some of the sessions:

Monday, December 5th
1:45 - 3:15 pm: Targeting Search Ads by Demographic & Behavior – Jed Nahum, Group Product Manager, adCenter (Steven 5)
3:45 – 5:15: Book Search panel – Thiru Anandanpillai, Group Product Manager, MSN Search (Steven 3&4 Lower Level)

Tuesday, December 6th
4:30 PM: M the Search Ad Vendors - Doug Stotland, Group Product Manager

Wednesday, December 7th
2:00pm - 3:30pm: Search Engine Q&A on Links – Ramez Naam, Group Program Manager, MSN Search (Continental AB)

Thursday, December 8th

10:45am - 12:00pm: Meet the Crawlers – Ramez Naam, Group Program Manager, MSN Search (Continental AB)
12:30pm - 1:45pm: Meet the Local Search Engines – Kevin Dillon, Product Unit Manager, MSN Local Search (Steven 3&4)

Our adCenter reps hope to see you in Chicago!

--adCenter