The big MSN adcenter update

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.