Last week, I wrote a blog talking about Microsoft adCenter Desktop and my first impressions of it. In that post, I said I would write one with a review of Microsoft adCenter its self. So here it is.

As I mentioned in that post, I am English and am used to spelling Centre the English (correct) way, therefore if you find any American spelling mistakes, please excuse me.

So, I have been using AdWords for a long time now, so have gotten pretty used to its functionality and how it works and whilst I have used Microsoft adCenter before, I stopped after a little while and never went back, until now.

So, what do I think? Well, to be honest, I don’t really know. The problem is, that its just not very usable. The actual running of the campaigns is easy, especially if you have the adCenter Desktop, but its the stuff around it that just doesn’t work.

Let me explain what I mean.

So, you start off with setting up an account. It should be quite easy, but to be honest, its what I found most frustrating about the whole thing.

First things first I had to set up an account for my client, fine, that was easy enough, or so I thought. The problem is that on the sign up screen it givers you the option to “Sign Up Now” or Sign Up using Windows Line ID. Now, because I know that there is a Windows Live ID attached to the email that I wanted to sign up with, so that is the option I went for. Personally, I think that is quite reasonable, I may be wrong, but to be honesty, i’m not.

So why is this a bad thing? Because you do not get to choose a username, but rather it goes with your email. The problem with this, is that on the usual signing in screen you can only put in a user name, it will not accept email addresses if they are too long, and this one was. So I chose again the bottom option to Sign in with my Windows Live ID. Ok, not a problem, I can continue to do that for the rest of the campaign. Well that is until I tried to login to the adCenter Desktop program, as that unfortunately does also not allow email addresses either, so I am stuck.

After speaking to a helpful guy from Microsoft, he explained that I would need to set up another profile in my account and give it the username that will fit.. So that’s what I did, and yes it worked, but its a long way round a very simple thing.

So now the account is setup. I want to create one for myself as an agency account, which I go through the procedure, learning my lesson from before and not choosing the Windows ID option. Now, the problem is that in order to create an account, I have to create a campaign, Ad Groups, Ad Text and keywords and, and this is a big and, I have to enter my payment details in. Now, I only want this account to manage my clients. As of yet I don’t plan to create anything for myself, so why do I have to enter account details in? Well, the answer is, because I do. So that’s what I do. And now I have an agency account. I login into the other account and invite myself, which does not come through for a while, when it does I accept. Unfortunately this is to no avail as I cannot see the campaigns in the account even though I can see that I am the agency attached to it. So I log into the other account and can see that they are attached. So again I speak to the guy from Microsoft to find out that I need to create another profile and set it up as a client admin rather than a Super Admin. This is getting a bit sill now. But I do it and it works. Hurrah.

Now, I know Microsoft had to come up with something different to Google as they could not copy them, different features and all that, but they have now taken, what was a good idea and made it bad by adding too much to it. I should be able to talk to you and say I created an account for a client and an account for me and it worked. Unfortunately I have written 567 words just about the sign up process.

But anyway, I have now have the accounts I need, so I can start.

If you had read my previous post, you would know that I had a problem originally logging into the Desktop, so I started the whole process building the campaigns in the browser. Now let me say, that I don’t like doing this even in AdWords, I always prefer to use Editor, but it is a little easier with adCenter.

The big problem I have and for me it really is a big one, is the negative keywords. They only allow 1022 characters for the whole lot, to put it in perspective, I have 1137 WORDS in the same campaign in AdWords which is 6909 characters. I really don’t know why they have done this. Negative keywords are such an importance in an account that there should never be this kind of limit. So for me, that is a massive problem.

Setting up everything else isn’t a massive problem, except the ads were held for about a day waiting to be reviewed, well, I am used to that with AdWords so that’s no biggy.

So, anyway, the account is all set up, the campaign is running, so I check out the reports, or at least I try to, unfortunately, when I create a new report I get a message saying:

Bit rubbish really isn’t it!

I then try to use the tools. I can’t use the application downloads as I use Open Office, not Excel, the Ad Preview Tool, just shows their search engine and I can do that myself by going to Bing. There Research keywords tool is pretty good and comprehensive so no issues there.

To be honest, if this was a new platform then I could forgive any of the issues here, but its not, its been around for years. So they really should know better.

I really wanted this to be a better experience, but its all a bit tarred by the thoughtlessness that has gone into it.

I hope it gets better, I really do. They must know they are the underdog in this market and really need to go above and beyond if they are going to win. Listen Microsoft, if you look at what Google does, you will see why people moan about yours. They have made it easy and work with accounts. They have made it easy  to use. Why don’t you try and emulate them. They really know what they are doing here and unfortunately, you don’t seem to.