First Impression On Microsoft adCenter

I was eager to try out the adCenter after seeing many places offering the $50 coupon. I wasn’t aware that the coupon is only for U.S customer until final sign up page. Well, forget about the $50 coupon, I signed up anyway.

First Glance..

I’m a practical type of person. I normally do not RTFM until I faced any difficulties/frustration. So I thought I get my dirty hands on adCenter before read anything.

Due to my prior experience on Google Adwords, setting up and running a campaign in adCenter is a breeze. It can be completed in 3 steps:

1) Campaign settings (campaign and order name, targetting preferences)
2) Write Ads
3) Add Keywords (and price accordingly, setup daily budget)

The account is structured under: Campaign -> Order -> Keywords. They even provide a diagram (shown below) everytime you setup a new campaign (in case it got you confused).

Everything works almost like Adwords, except it is easier.

What I didn’t like

Speed. The programming team (especially the AJAX) of adCenter must optimize their code more. Or perhaps the reason was I’m running Firefox on it. Whatever. Painfully slow.

Keyword research. It doesn’t have geographical targeting keyword research tool (although I have many other substitutes to do that) and it doesn’t automatically remove duplicated keywords. I hate when I have to click on each duplicated keywords to remove it before I can proceed.

Apart from them, I like the effort from the Microsoft adCenter team, on challenging both of the market leaders (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing), as a late comer. Well, that sums up my first impression on Microsoft Adcenter with no more than 24 hours of using it.