Ad's not showing - MSN recommends 24/7

[Nivik23]

Recently I noticed that my Ad's were not showing on MSN. I emailed support to ask why. I recieved a long email explaining many aspects of the program, but what I found to be most distrubing was what was listed first as a possible cause why my Ad's were not showing:

"I ran reports for the month of October that showed the daily activity for the month. What I found is that because the ads are not running on the weekend, the amount of clicks and impressions drop to zero. This in turn may work against your order’s consistency and it is costing you some clicks. I realize that there must be a reason for not running your ads on the weekend and at night, however, if your competitors are running during those times, they will gather more CTR (Click-Thru-Rate) and eventually will place better in the search results. I strongly recommend that you allow your ads to run 24/7"

Isn't CTR the amount of clicks you get in regards to how many impressions you get? Why would my CTR rate suffer when I am not having any impressions?

"this may work against your order's consistency"

Sure it would, if you analyze the order based upon 24/7, but if you look at the consistency based upon when the order was actually running, which I think any reasonable person would, then there would be no negative effects.

It's comparible to firing an employee because that employee's work product yielded nothing during the weekends he doesn't go to work on.

No, I am not going to run my Ad's 24/7. It doesn't make sense for my company. It increases our costs 25% while only bringing in 9% more leads, many of which are bad.

My question is why does MSN allow you to select a time frame in which your Ad will perform the best (based upon a year of data from AdWords) and then penelize you for doing so???

The obvious answer: so they can make more money.

NiV23

[IgorMordkovich]

Niv ... very interesting post. I didn't know this about MSN. I mean I knew they were 10 years behind but this is an addition to the "great service they provide".

[Nivik23]

After emailing MSN support back about how aburd I found the whole notion that if I do not run my Ad's 24/7, they will not perform well (or in my case at all), they did retract the statement:

"I do realize that not running your ads on the weekend should not negatively impact your ads. If the keywords are maintaining a good CTR then they should be competitive regardless of schedules. I apologize for the misunderstanding.

It has come to my attention that there might be an issue that is affecting some of our customer’s ads at this moment. We are diligently working to find the cause and I will investigate this issue with your ads further."

Now it's just an "issue", considering my recent run in with MSN not correctly passing on referral information for their search (which to my knowledge has yet to be fixed for browsers other than IE), I'm getting a little sick of MSN's "issues".

But I will give MSN this, they do have the lowest cost per conversion for my campaign ($5 compared to $25 for Google and Yahoo!).

NiV23

[IgorMordkovich]

Niv .... I've having the same issue with MSN. Ads not displayed all the time even though budget was raised 3 fold. Waiting for MSN rep to get back to me.

[ThirdEye]

I've been experiencing the exact same issue with adCenter, ads not showing in multiple campaigns at all for a lot of significant high base bid keywords. After contacting support, the reply was:

"I have read your email and understand you are having a problem locating your Ad when search with high base bid keywords. I do apologize for the frustration and inconvenience this is causing you not being able to locate your Ad after having such a high base bid.

To remedy this issue I have a couple of trouble shooting steps, I would like you to do. The first step is you might want to change the high base bid keywords from broad match to either exact or phrase match.

The other suggestion I would like to make at this time is for you to change your Monthly Budget from divide across the month to Spend budget until depleted."

Does this imply that my ads don't show for an exact keyword match because the match type selected is broad?? Sorry, but I don't find the reasoning in that one at all. And as to changing the budget spend, if the current budget is set to at least 20 times what the actual monthly spend has been since we started in February and their determination is that dividing it across the month will cause it to run out, then I believe they need some new batteries in their calculator.

I have to admit, adCenter has been the source of more PPC problems than I have ever experienced with all of the others we've utilized combined. Bidding on keywords has changed by itself (yes, keep an eye on your bids!), all of our keywords were initially rejected by their "automated" review process and had to be resubmitted, manually, multiple times with supporting documentation and reasons why they were rejected in error each time. (For reference, should this happen to anyone else, the automated process would accept one keyword in a list, and then systematically reject the next three, then repeat the process, in order, all the way down through the list... and I could never get support to admit this was a problem even though it was blatantly clear what was happening just by looking at the list.)

Probably the most frustrating outstanding issue that I have never been able to get resolved is that their (support) email server consistently rejects email from my domain and I am forced to resort to using a Yahoo email address to even communicate with them! Email from them winds up in my junk bin (maybe that's an omen) and when I reply, it always bounces. You would think someone, somewhere would know what a "whitelist" is?

My apologies for the rant, but after 9 months of dealing with adCenter I think I was due to share my experiences, and I sympathize with you others having problems with your impressions at the moment. I guess bottom line is, if, and when they actually want to make more money with this program, they will address and fix these things. Until then, flip a coin to see if your ad shows!

[Toure]

Guys, your problems are not anything to do with you.

MSN are experiencing issues where adverts are appearing intermittently after every X number of refreshes.

This is a problem effecting many other advertisers on the network and is something that MSN's Tech support team are apparently addressing.

This is simply a bug in the system.

Therefore there is pretty much nothing that can be done until they resolve the issue unfortunately.

[CraigM]

We recently upped our budget from $500 a month to $1500 a month, with run till budget is depleted selected. We did not change any of our times we run the campaign (M-F mornings and afternoons).

Before we increased the budget, we barely spent $150 of our $500 budget, with good CTR and CPC. Our average position was 2.4. Once we increased our budget, our avg position went down to 3.24 (and steadily going down), our CTR has gone down, and our CPC has gone up. (We did increase some bids, but not enough to affect it this much, as the bids increased were keywords that didn't get clicked on much, and it hasn't changed with the increase in bid).

Has anyone else had this issue with MSN?

[Discovery]

I agree with the posts above. Our conversions have been great if I want to generate a small trickle of business. If I try to increase volume, a variety of tactics have been used, our CPL goes through the roof. Worse is that as many have pointed out there seems to be no logic to how and where our ads are paced/ranked.

What gets us very concerned are results like this:
http://www.junkclick.com/bills.jpg

I see people get away with this all the time on MSN. So one company can run the table on top positions with a BLATANT double ad campaign? What if they were using a somewhat clever tactic (that I wont mention)? They could run the table on the first page! We're a white hat shop, but I know that it can be done on MSN if you have the budget. In the arena of mortgage, debt or finance there are companies with deep pockets that are willing to pay for owning all the real estate for certain terms. I could see this contributing to the "my ads are never found" dilemma.

For now we keep everything low on MSN and take the smattering of returns that come in, hoping that one day soon these issues will be fixed and the network will expand.

Discovery