Well, most of us affiliate marketers have been whining about MSN’s adcenter interface and how virtually unworkable it is. They are far behind all the other big 3 PPC engines, and most 2nd tier engines as well in my opinion. Now they are planning a big upgrade tonight which will take down their system for 8 hours, and delay reports for another 72 hours. Let’s hope this is the major renovation we have all been asking for! According to their recent email, here are the changes they are attempting:

Upgrade highlights:

• Save time with fast and thorough editorial reviews for new ad groups.

• Create campaigns with ease by quickly importing campaigns directly from other paid search programs or by copying existing ad groups within adCenter to a new campaign.

• Instantly navigate to specific accounts, campaigns, or ad groups with the new adCenter home page dashboard, a one-stop-shop for all of your daily campaign management tasks.

• Update keyword bids in bulk and view keyword performance on the same page.

• Visualize your campaigns’ targeting settings with Microsoft Virtual EarthTM map integration for geographical targeting.

To me by far the biggest improvement that I am excited about is the ability to import other campaigns from Google and Yahoo. This will be a huge timesaver and I’m sure increase the amounts spent at MSN. It should allow me to use the technique that I currently use with my other campaigns, which is to build everything with Google’s offiline adwords editor, export, then import into Yahoo for example. Hopefully MSN’s new “convert 3rd party campaign” works as well as Yahoo. We shall see.

Ok, so I know I have ranted about MSN Adcenter in the past, but they just seem to keep making things worse.  They seem to have the reverse Midas touch (everything they touch turns to crap).  Here are my latest gripes:

Lack of alternate text for dynamic keyword insertion over 25 characters.  You guys really need to get on the ball and fix this.  I don’t want to run 2 ads so one can fail over, or set up ridiculous {param2} fields for each term.  Please just fix this issue so we don’t have to take 10x longer than it should to do a simple dynamic keyword insertion.

Capitalizing the display URL.  Again, this is something you need to fix in your system.  Adding extra parameters doesn’t cut it.

Import/Export.  We still need a system to export keywords/adgroups/campaigns.  Then we can make our edits an import them back in.  You have the import feature on the beta interface, but it pretty pointless without an export feature.  All the other PPC services have this ability.  Even Looksmart and Ask have it in their interface.

Content Network.  When you upgrade advertisers to the content network, don’t turn it on by default.  No one is going to run in hybrid mode because we need to track the content network separately than normal search network.  Sneaking the content network into people’s campaigns is not going to win you any points.  Especially when people who aren’t on the ball about their stats suddenly see their conversions tank and delete their campaigns.

I am trying to be patient MSN, but please listen to your advertisers and work with us here. We are trying to give you our money!

You are slowly losing me Adcenter.

Most things get better with age, Adcenter seems to be getting worse by the day. The interface is pretty much unworkable for any large scale campaigns. Everytime I ask them about it, I keep getting that an update is on the way, but it never gets here.

The upload tool is terrible. There HAS to be a way to upload muliple groups for large campaigns. Or better yet a way to upload whole campaigns like nearly every other PPC service has, even 2nd and 3rd tier.

The constant rejected keywords, followed by rejected keyword emails are annoying. It’s to the point now where I don’t even care to go in and see what was rejected. Perhaps if the interface was workable, it might not be so bad. But the thought of having to navigate around in there just isn’t worth it. I am sure they are losing massive amounts of money by having a poor interface/upload system. I know they are from me.

This brings us to yesterday, when I logged in to my account and found $2k in spend for the previous day. Clicks that had a max CPC of .10 were racking up $80 a click. OK, there is clearly a problem that I hope they can resolve. But there needs to be some communication. They could have posted it on their blog, or better yet sent out an email alert. If they no there is a huge system wide problem, communication is key. You’d think a company with the backing of the most profitable company on earth could have the resources to be a little proactive about things like this.

MSN, you need to pull it together quickly!

This is an update to the first Pay Per Click Network challenge of a few weeks ago. There is new data, new PPC networks included, and a new scoring system based on everyone’s input from the last one. Hopefully it will be even more helpful now.

To review:

These networks were all tested running the same PPC campaign (meaning the keywords and the ad texts were the same) to an affiliate offer with the exact same landing page.

Scoring system:

I threw out the interface rating as many people thought it skewed the results of bad performing networks that had a good interface. I agree that performance is king and if something converts well I can live with a bad interface (MSN, cough, cough). Now the scoring is based on 3 factors with 2 being double weighted. This should more accurately show the total performance of a PPC network.

• Traffic Volume (Highest volume = 10 out of possible 10)
• Conversion Rate (Best conversion rate = 10 out of possible 10)
• Click Pricing (Lowest pricing = 5 out of possible 5)

For a possible total score of 30

The Results:

PPC Network	Traffic Volume	Conversion Rate	Click Pricing	Total Score
MSN	6	9	4	19
Yahoo	8	7	3	18
Google	10	7	1	18
Searchfeed	6	6	3	15
Looksmart	3	7	4	14
Miva	2	6	4	12
Adbrite	2	2	4	8
7Search	1	2	5	8
Enhance	1	1	5	7
Kanoodle	1	1	5	7
Search 123	1	1	4	6
Bidvertiser	1	1	4	6

Traffic Volume Winner:

As always Google is king of traffic volume. The only thing that keeps it from the overall leader is its stiff click pricing.

Conversion Rate Winner:

MSN is the tops for conversions. Too bad their volume isn’t up to Google or Yahoo’s levels.

Recommended:
• MSN
• Yahoo
• Google
• Searchfeed
• Looksmart
• Miva

Stay Away!
• Adbrite
• 7Search
• Enhance
• Kanoodle
• Search 123
• Bidvertiser

Remember these results are based on my campaign and niche, your results may vary wildly.

I have found it really hard to find objective information about different Pay Per Click (PPC) networks, especially second tier networks. If you pose the question in a forum, the response will usually be something like “XYZ sucks”, which isn’t too helpful as far as hard data is concerned. So I decided to run my own, somewhat scientific test of PPC networks. Here is what happened.

About the test

I chose a set of ads and keywords that were proven to do well on Google Adwords for these tests. I won’t say the niche (competition is tough enough already), but it’s about a mid-range set of keywords as far as monthly impressions and click pricing. The minimum spent at each PPC network was $50, with most of the test running in the $100-$300 range. If it was clear the traffic was not going to convert, I cut the test short, but if it showed some promise I let it run for a while.

After examining the results, I assigned a score between 1 and 5, with 5 being the highest, to each of these 5 categories:

• Traffic Volume (Highest volume = 5)
• Conversion Rate (Best conversion rate = 5)
• Click Pricing (Lowest pricing = 5)
• Keyword Competition (Lowest competition = 5)
• Interface ease of use (Easiest to use = 5)

After totaling up the scores, each PPC network was given a final score. Winners for each category and an overall winner were chosen, based on the scores.

The 10 networks tested

• Google Adwords
• Yahoo Search Marketing (Panama system)
• MSN Adcenter
• Adbrite
• Miva
• Searchfeed
• Kanoodle
• Enhance
• Looksmart
• Search123

The Results

PPC Network	Traffic Volume	Conversion Rate	Click Pricing	Keyword Competition	Interface Use	Average Score
MSN	3	5	5	4	3	4
Looksmart	3	4	4	4	4	3.8
Searchfeed	3	4	4	4	3	3.8
Google	5	3	3	1	5	3.4
Yahoo	4	4	3	2	4	3.4
Miva	2	2	5	4	4	3.4
Adbrite	3	1	5	4	4	3.4
Enhance	1	3	5	5	3	3.2
Search 123	1	1	4	5	2	2.8
Kanoodle	1	1	5	5	3	2.8

Category Winners

Traffic Volume:

Not a big surprise here, the king of Traffic is Google by a long shot.

Conversion Rate:

MSN takes the prize for the best conversion rate. Adcenter’s traffic converted about 10% better than the closest competitor.

Click Pricing:

The lower traffic networks are always going to have the cheapest clicks, so we have a 5 way tie here between MSN, Miva, Adbrite, Enhance, and Kanoodle.

Keyword Competition:

Keywords were easy to buy with little to no competition on Enhance, Kanoodle, and Search 123.

Interface ease of use:

Google reigns supreme again in the interface department. Their continually improving web interface along with its offline Adwords editor make it tough to beat. Although the new Yahoo Panama system is a close second and gaining quickly.

Overall Winner:

The winner of the smackdown is MSN. Their strong placing for conversions and click pricing, coupled with a decent traffic volume puts them in the number one spot. A surprisingly strong second place tie goes to Searchfeed and Looksmart. Their low click pricing, and low competition helped them edge out some of the Tier 1 heavyweights in the field.

Although the undisputed kings of volume, Google and Yahoo were hit hard by their higher pricing and extreme keyword competition.

Keep in mind these results were for one specific niche and keyword group, your results may vary wildly.