Beware The Lag

[SonicAM19]

FYI: There is a long lag time in pausing and resuming campaigns or orders. We were experiencing site issues, tried pausing the account, it took 24 hours for the ads to stop running, and for us to stop incurring click costs.

[Discovery]

I can understand that there may be a lag time from the time that you turn off your campaigns and when the ads actually stop running. 24 hours is far too long. The question is what is an acceptable amount of lag time?

To be fair if I turn off my ads I should expect to incur click costs for about 30 minutes to an hour. Otherwise I could turn my ads off and on all day long in an attempt to not pay for a number of clicks.

On the other hand after an hour I believe that if the SE can't stop running the ads then they should not charge for clicks occurring after 60 minutes.

Does this 60 minute threshold sound reasonable and fair to you?

It would be great if MSN could come up with a clear guideline on how clicks are charged after an order/campaign has been turned off.

Discovery

[SonicAM19]

To give them credit, they did issue a credit for the click charges. I was bringing it up as a heads up. I believe an hour is acceptable, and 2 hours at the latest. The message I first received when I brought it up to them was, calls to the system are taking longer than the normal 3-4 hours. This included bid updates as well as pausing/resuming orders. I think 3-4 hours is entirely too long, and for it to take longer than that was not right, which they agreed with. There are countless reasons why people would need to pause a campaign, and a reasonable time frame for the action to be sent through is all one can expect. It also took 15 hours or so to resume a campaign after the original situation.

[Mel66]

"Instant" on/off would be ideal - and not very realistic. 60 minutes is acceptable. 4 hours is not. 15 to 24 hours is ridiculous.

Melissa

[tonerman]

For comparison, it takes Google up to "several" hours to pause or resume an ad. See comments from Adwords Rep here on time required at Google:

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?p=74147#post74147

[CraigM]

I think that Adwords Rep was taken a bit out of context here. The thread here is talking about the campaigns in Ad Center not turning on, and the linked article is referring to changes to ads. Not really an apples to apples comparison IMHO.

I turned on Adcenter this past Tuesday Afternoon, and I didn't see any impressions until mid-morning Wednesday. We have some competive words for our industry, so I know that there would have at least popped up in a search.

Google, on the other hand, seems to turn on quickly. Even when I made changes to Ads and the like, the changes seem to pop up fairly quickly. I made some changes to ads on Friday morning, and I saw them incorporated within an hour. Ad Center takes awhile to reflect changes made to ads and bid adjustments. I submitted a few new keywords on Wednesday, and as of Friday afternoon, they words were still pending.

[SonicAM19]

Exactly Craig. I do not understand how Google can quickly start/ stop adgroups and such, but it takes a full day to turn on an order? It makes no sense. Maybe they are still working on it, and all of these adcenter gripes will be fixed in due time.

[CraigM]

Exactly Craig. I do not understand how Google can quickly start/ stop adgroups and such, but it takes a full day to turn on an order? It makes no sense. Maybe they are still working on it, and all of these adcenter gripes will be fixed in due time.


I think the biggest difference between the two is experience. MSN is playing catch up right now in the PPC world.

I'm going to be a little patient as MSN works around these issues. I just wish they would say that this was an issue, and they are working towards resolving it.

[SonicAM19]

I just contacted my rep about reporting delay, as I have no data for the last two days in my reports. She said that they are aware of the problem, it is with all accounts, and they are working on it. She said there is a 3 DAY DELAY on all daily reporting. So, they admit it, but we are still just waiting to see how are accounts are performing or how much we are spending in the meantime. I find it hard to believe they do not have the data. I am curious how related to Saturday's update this is.