New features to be added to Adcenter

[Discovery]

Microsoft adCenter will upgrade on Friday, September 7. The tools and functionality in this upgrade will include significant improvements in editorial efficiency, campaign creation, and campaign management.

During this upgrade, adCenter will be temporarily unavailable for up to 8 hours on Friday, starting at 6:00 P.M. Pacific Time. Your ads and keywords will remain live and continue to run as usual, during this time.

After this upgrade, reporting will be delayed for up to 72 hours. To see when your data was last updated, check the timestamp on the bottom of adCenter Reporting tab.

Upgrade highlights:
Save time with fast and thorough editorial reviews for new ad groups.
Create campaigns with ease by quickly importing campaigns directly from other paid search programs or by copying existing ad groups within adCenter to a new campaign.
Instantly navigate to specific accounts, campaigns, or ad groups with the new adCenter home page dashboard, a one-stop-shop for all of your daily campaign management tasks.
Update keyword bids in bulk and view keyword performance on the same page.
Visualize your campaigns' targeting settings with Microsoft Virtual EarthTM map integration for geographical targeting.
For details on how to use these adCenter improvements view the Feature Release Guide. In addition, the adCenter Blog will highlight detailed feature reviews after the upgrade occurs.

If you have any questions, please contact our adCenter Support Team.

Sincerely,

The Microsoft adCenter Team

Initially I believe the "import campaigns from any SE" will have the largest impact. This is the smartest move I have seen any engine competing with google take. If I have fully deployed campaigns on Google and it took only a matter of minutes to export and import that into another PPC program would I not do that?

Looking forward to see how these new features are implemented.

Discovery

[adamap]

Way to be on top of this Discovery. I just got an email announcing this. I wish they had the 'import campaigns' feature 6 months ago! Hopefully one will be able to modify their campaigns with this feature as well. I.E. you make some changes in AdWords, export the campaign from the AdWords Editor and import them right into MSN (assuming they accounts are mirrored). This obviously would be more relevant to keyword and copy changes rather than bidding changes.

MSN has been pretty aggressive in soliciting feedback and it looks like they are starting to implement some changes.

Thanks for the updates. Now give us an OFFLINE EDITOR PLEASE.

[ExposureTim]

offline editor? Right. They'd rather you upgrade your version of Excel!

[PPC]

"Update keyword bids in bulk and view keyword performance on the same page"

Crossing my fingers on this one... the interface is so hard to use now in terms of updating bids.

The easy import Goolge feature sounds good, too.

[Discovery]

from Adcenter

Import campaigns
You can import entire campaigns into Microsoft adCenter from
other online advertising programs—complete with your original ad groups, keywords, and ads. To ensure that your content is imported correctly, use either a Microsoft Office Excel file or a CSV file (Comma-separated values file. Text-format data file in which stored values are separated by commas. CSV file names typically end with a .csv extension (for example, "my_file.csv"). ) , and use the same columns and column order that adCenter uses.


Click the Campaigns tab.
Click Import campaigns.
To save a template to your computer or network share for importing campaigns, click Microsoft Excel file or CSV file.
Before you can import campaigns, you must first create a report in Google or another similar online advertising program, and save it to your computer or network share. Select columns to match those in the templates. Make sure that they're in the same order as in the templates. And then add your campaign information (including ad groups, ads, keywords, and bids) to the template you saved on your computer.
In the drop-down list, select a language and region for your campaigns.

Click import.
Locate the Excel or CSV file you want to import on your computer or from a network share, select the file, and then click Open. The list of imported campaigns will appear in the table.

Notes:

Different online advertising programs typically require slightly different data formats; you will need to adjust your formatting before you import.

If you see errors when importing, you can reduce many of them by closing the file before importing.

I can't even begin to tell you what a let down this is. If the advertiser has to do the conversion from one SE's format to Adcenter's then who gives a rats behind? Are you guys not the programming guru's? Are you telling me you can't create some type of SAS app where we simply export Google's/Yahoo's/ASK's campaign file, import it AS IS into your app, you convert it, display the potential results (field mapping) and then click to confirm import?

Unless I'm missing something all MSN has done is tell us how to use Google reports to customize the report so it works with their existing import file process, no?

Discovery

[adCenter411]

Hi Discovery,
It looks like maybe you were looking at the pre-release version of Help - the most updated version has the correct info for the new release. (Help was updated mid-Monday.)

You are now able to directly import campaigns from other search advertising programs without making formatting adjustments in the export file. As long as the core adCenter columns are included, extra columns or data are ignored.

I hope this helps - let me know how it goes.

Thanks!
adCenter411

[Discovery]

Thanks for the reply Adcenter.

I think this is a very important feature and one I am looking forward to using extensively. I took the time to go through the process step by step.

Unfortunately the process is not even close to being an easy export and import into MSN.

The statement "Without making formatting adjustments" is just plainly false. I believe if you have a working process you need to present it to the community in a very simplistic and perhaps exciting fasion. Currently its as exciting and easy to understand as a book on Molecular Structures for Nano-technology.

Discovery

[guinanie]

That would be a great news on Microsoft . The Microsoft Adcenter is a site that I usually used and visited in promoting our site. It is nice to know the Microsoft Adcenter is improving their functionality and including the campaign management.nd campaign management.

[mohsink4u]

Hi ,
Is there any feature like:
Pausing the existings Ads and running the new Ads in MSN.
Last week i had faced the same problem and then i had to delete the existing ads resulting in the loss of the CTR.
thanks
Pervez