Troubles on the Back End

Troubles on the Back End

If MSN? adCenter has an Achilles' heel, it's on the back end. While this new pay-per-click, or PPC, advertising platform has some innovative targeting and analytic features, search marketers find using them can be messy.

While adCenter supports a simple campaign well enough, difficulties arise when search-engine marketers, or SEM's, try to simultaneously manage complex, high-volume campaigns for their clients. For instance, adCenter ads and keywords must be set up separately and individually. Uploading the same data with Google? and Yahoo!? can be accomplished by uploading a single spreadsheet. The additional set-up time adds considerable cost to managing an adCenter campaign and increases the chance for errors.

When errors occur, fixing them is a challenge, due to creaky adCenter customer support. Among the complaints registered by advertisers are:

-- difficulty finding a knowledgeable service representative;
-- slow response once contact is made;
-- form letter e-mail responses that do not really help;
-- lengthy processing time for standard tracking reports;
-- confusing or incorrect data on tracking reports;
-- programming glitches that bring campaigns to a temporary standstill; and,
-- no way to manage multiple accounts with one global login.

To a degree, some problems can be excused by adCenter's novelty. This paid-search option is very much a work-in-progress. Microsoft? took the platform out of beta in May 2006, and has been upgrading and adding features ever since. Rapid, ongoing development is unavoidable if adCenter wants to keep pace with market leader Google? AdSense. Even an industry giant like Microsoft? cannot be expected to perfect programming and support within a few months under these circumstances.

Other problems stem from corporate gamesmanship. Initially, adCenter did not support the Firefox? 1.5 browser. However, since at least 20 percent of the market uses Firefox?, adCenter's move rendered SEM's incapable of tracking conversions on large chunks of their PPC campaigns. Finally, in early August, Microsoft? upgraded adCenter to work with the open-source browser, but by then, the damage to advertiser confidence already was done.

Given Microsoft?'s track record, it is hard to imagine adCenter's back-end pain lasting for long. Whether today's headaches turn SEM's away from the platform long-term remains to be seen. However, as Microsoft? and Google? continue to advance on each other's turf with products outside their core strengths, users everywhere will have to live with a lot of growing pains.