Microsoft

Work in progress was the theme of the MSN AdCenter pre SES meeting today. They seem to be taking notes on all the problems keep addressing on the various message boards and they plan to start rolling out feature upgrades.

The next big update to Microsoft AdCenter will be on August 5^th, 2006, referred to as the 8-5-6 update.

Here is what they are planning on adding:

• Support for Firefox 1.5 – One less thing for everyone to complain about.
• Cut & Paste – up to 200 Keywords, up from 100
• Filters by Timestamp – this is a fancy way of saying that they are copying the AdWords interface. It will allow you to change the time frame of the report details on the keyword/order/campaign pages. Right now it is showing “life to date” and it will allow you to change it to month to date, last month, etc.
• Reporting Update – They are working making the reporting more up to date, pull the info quicker, etc.
• Various Bug Fixes – all the stuff that people noted on the forums, including getting billed over yopur budget due to delays in their system
• Estimation tool - Improving the estimation tool to be more accurate.

Maybe not in this release, but probably in the next:

• Power Posting – like on Adwords it would allow users to paste in a keyword, url, bid price and parameter.
• Negative Keyword Enhancement – not 100% sure what they are doing on this, but they will be expanding the capabilities of the negative keywords.
• Waterfall Properties – this is the fancy name for adjusting something at a top level and having it apply to the things below it. I will call hieratical preferences…such things as geo targeting, day parting, demographic settings, hopefully negatives, could be applied at a campaign or account level and apply to everything below, rather than having to manually adjust the settings on every order in your account.

Other then that stuff they talked a bit about their contextual network, tools, analytics and some other items…nothing major other than these fixes. MSFT did show some testimonials from adveritsers and I plan to diagnose their business models and see if I can replicate the results for my self (c:

The tools seem to be pretty amazing over at AdCenter Labs. Geddes (TV’s eWhisper) covered one of their keyword tools, their new free analytics program (coming soon), and touched on the contextual hype.
Check out the official MSN Adcenter Blog for more updates.

Got this from MSN today in the mail, it looks like they will be making some much needed changes to AdCenter this evening.

>>>>>
Hello Everyone,

Guess what’s happening today, between 4PM and 10PM PST?

For one thing: The MTV Movie Awards are finally here!

If this doesn’t excite you, how about: Brand new Microsoft adCenter features are being released.

During this time, we’ll be upgrading several features in adCenter, including:

A new Reports page user interface
* Create a New Report tab
* Recent Reports tab
* Report Templates tab
* Customize date ranges
* Schedule and save reports
* Download reports

Additional reporting upgrades
* Schedule and run multiple reports in the background while you are working in adCenter
* Run more than 10,000 rows of report data (downloadable in .ZIP format)
* Run reports in multiple formats .TSV (Tab Separated Value) and .HTML formats
* View the previous 20 reports in the Recent Reports tab

We’ll also be launching our new Video Help that will provide a variety of step-by-step videos explaining adCenter tasks and information.

There are a few other goodies in there so be sure to check in after 10PM PST (or whenever the last “golden popcorn” is handed out) to explore the new features.

P.S. During this time you will not be able to access adCenter – but don’t worry, your current keywords and ads will continue to run.

I was just featured in an article in Bloomberg, and quoted near the bottom. I think the whole article gets a big part of it wrong…

From an advertising standpoint MSN is one hell of a value. First off it is targeted as hell, and you can make it more targeted with their crazy passport profiling… age, sex, location, etc… pretty nice stuff….but it is even more targeted in the fact that it is PURE MSN TRAFFIC. Google cannot claim this, yahoo cannot either…both of these companies have content networks that you can opt into but both also whore their feeds out to those who have massive traffic…

There has been some big news lately about domainers and how they are showing your ads when you are not supposed to be paying for it… I am not sure if MSN is just late to the game, or if they do not have plans for this…but either way right now their traffic is 100% MSN Search… BUY IT.

The article seems to have twisted the words to make it seem like people will not spend the money on MSN because the traffic is just not there…well buddy, we would spend the money if the traffic was there, but how can you raise your budget when it will not be spent?

I think the whole point of the article should be the following: MSN has shit (in terms of volume, not quantity) traffic, but a nice product at the moment, they need more traffic and users and there will be more ad inventory for their advertisers to buy…they seemed to have upped the ante by adding some sweet targeting features to their system that Google and yahoo currently do not have in place. Advertisers would love to spend more money with them, but they cannot do to the smaller market share that MSN has compared to Google.

The bottom line is: If you are able to get a nice return on investment on you advertising spend then you spend it… MSN does give a sweet ROI, we just want more volume and we will buy it.

Are you using MSN AdCenter, and if so what do you think of it and how is it working and converting for you?

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