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I could do an entire blog just about what a piece of shit adCenter is not only from a user interface point of view, but also from a service point of view and even a support point of view. Basically, I wouldn’t piss on adCenter if it was on fire. In fact, the web could collectively save a lot of time by making a text file containing all the good things about adCenter. 45 seconds after we started, the entire web could go out for drinks - not that I want to drink beer with the ragtag group of libertarians, kiddy fiddlers and pimply MMORPG dorks that make up the net. Back to the point, though, today’s particular issue only seemed worth mentioning because it was so damned odd that hopefully someone else with the same issue might stumble across this blog entry and save him or herself the time of trying to apply logic to adCenter (something one should never do) in discovering a solution.

My current client had been using adCenter for about a year with limited traffic when suddenly, one day, the keywords all showed up paused. Long story short, MSN first claimed it was a glitch, then said the glitch was fixed and then, when it became obvious that they had no control over their shit-tastic application, they mumbled back to the client something about improving the quality of their pages. After a month of re-working the campaign strategy and deciding that MSN’s only value was as a testbed for PPC tactics, I and the client set up a new account with the same keywords pointing to the same pages, in some cases using the same ads. The account is running basically fine, the quality is apparently good enough this time around, so, in short, adCenter is not only a piece of shit, but it’s apparently serviced on the support end by a bunch of Indian call center reps armed with ouija boards and tarot cards.

During the creation of the new campaign, we chose to organize it all ahead of time using the adCenter spreadsheet import template. I have to say that the template does its job fairly well and allows you to create most of what you need automagically. Of course once it’s uploaded we still had to go through the various adgroups tweaking the individual settings one at a time. This takes hours because of the way MSN has implemented their interface and also because everything adCenter touches turns to shit. In any case, having uploaded the campaign and tweaked all the settings we were ready to go.

On day two, we decided to go through and insert our tracking variables into the destination URLs for each adgroup. I did this by hand and got off to a roaring start (which, on adCenter, is defined as four clicks and three minutes to accomplish one URL alteration). About 45 minutes into the affair, I ran across something odd. An adGroup that I had not yet altered, to my shock and amazement, had the dynamic variables in it. Flummoxed, I checked back and forth between other adgroups and couldn’t figure this out, so I kept going and ran into it again. I checked back and forth and thought about this and I finally figured out what was going on.

Normally, when you create an ad inside an adgroup it is saved as a unique ad regardless of content. Because of the nature of our strategy, we had thirty or fourty adgroups each with an individual ad, but sometimes those ads were identical between groups. It turns out that when you import your campaign from a spreadsheet, adCenter groups all the ads together independent of adgroup and assigns them a unique internal AdId, so when you edit an identical ad in adgroup A after uploading and then go check an identical ad in adgroup B, the ad in adgroup B will reflect the changes made to the one in adgroup A.

Thanks, adCenter, for this handy fucking functionality that confused me for at least an hour! Sure, it’s not a huge deal once you know what’s going on, but like every other feature of adCenter it doesn’t work like it should and it causes you grief. Add together all the collective grief caused by all the collective bugs and unexpected “features” and pretty soon you’ve got a gigantic turd of a PPC program.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Click Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.