August 24, 2006

MSN AdCenter = Sloppy, Sloppy Work

Yeah, it's been a while since I posted, I've got a few other blogs going on, but a pure need to talk about how MSN AdCenter is so mishandled has prompted me to speak up. Here are some major issues I've found that are just sloppy and totally unacceptable from supposedly the world's largest computer software company:

The support emails I get, they come from Moonshot Dev (BY2MTZPSQLE07) . WHAT??? Moonshot Dev... and a bunch of meaningless characters, very nice. But I will give them this, it's a step up from what they used to come from some long raw mail server address that looked like they didn't bother to take the minute needed to set up an email alias.

But the best part? Everytime I go to open their support email I get a big fat "Website Certified by an Unknown Authority" warning. Upon inspection it's because they decided to serve the graphic header for the email from: https://adcenter.msn.com/images/adCenter_p_h_pos_309x56.gif and then not bother to be sure the secure certificate at that location is set up right. So a big message proclaims that the trustworthiness of adcenter.msn.com is in question. Well, maybe they are just being honest. It's still unclear why a graphic needs to be served from a secure server anyhow, but Microsoft can't be bothered with petty little things like doing anything correct, now can they?

So why did I need a support email? Well apparently one of my ads ran afoul of their guidelines. They do not allow pharmaceutical sites to run ads on their network, and their sophisticated automated review system caught this disgusting violation. Uh, except that the ad was for a Pharmicist Job Search site, not drugs. The ad language, the resulting page and the keywords that were being bid on all clearly indicate the intent. But, you know, I can see the mistake... one time. But after getting on the phone a couple months ago to clear up the confusion and get the ads reinstated, 2 months later the exact same problem has occured on the exact same ads that have not changed. Way to bandaid the problem and not solve the underlying issue!

And let's talk about conversion tracking. It's the most useful thing a PPC can ever provide, it let's you know your ROI. But rather than provide a comprehensive tracking script that works in every browser because it's just standard plain old javascript like EVERY other PPC service out there, they provide some oddity that works just fine, unless you have Firefox. So what, you say. It's a minor player in the market place and so you don't track a portion of your conversions. Well, depending on your audience Firefox can be an average of 20% of your users, even higher for tech geared sites. If you're pushing any type of volume of traffic, that's a lot of people. But no, it doesn't just mean you lose some tracking data, your users actaully get some kind of secure certificate error on their confirmation page if you are using secure transactions. So your user completes their credit card transaction and gets an error message, that's just wonderful. That won't generate concerned calls from panicked customers or destroy your site's appearance of trust with secure information for consumers. It begs the question: Did Microsoft put this gotcha in for their most feared competitor in the browser market place intentionally, which would be unethical and flat out wrong for their advertisers, or are they just grossly incompetent in their development? There are only two answers to why that is happening, and neither is a good thing.

The reportingis horrible and gives you nothing useful as a report and you will never ever ever get the information you requested then. No, you get a "your report is being created, please return to request it again later and you can view it then" type message. Sadly this is what you see in Yahoo Search Marketing on occassion as well, and that needs to stop. Both you guys, buy a few more servers to handle the processing, stop being cheap, it's not acceptable to make me wait 5 minutes to tell me my click through rate for last month.

I won't even go into the oddly named sections of the interface, such as "orders" for something that well, isn't what anyone in their right mind would think of as an order.

So... maybe the big lesson to learn here is this: Beta testing in France is a stupid idea.

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