I am Paul Singh

I’ve cancelled my AdCenter account after less than one full month with the service.

I first got the idea to open the account after reading the WorkHappy One Month Challenge where is saw this:

Here’s the deal: Microsoft adCenter is MSN’s answer to AdWords and works essentially the same way. It’s Microsoft’s pay per click offering. You bid on keywords, adCenter charges you when people click your ad. It’s new, and Microsoft is trying to promote it. So much in fact, that they’re giving away $200 in free advertising.

As you know, I helped found UpSolv last year and I figured this was a good time to test out AdCenter (and since I’m a sucker for free money) so I quickly signed up for the account. I followed the help guides that seemed to indicate that I needed to setup a $200 campaign budget and set the end date for one calendar month. (I signed up on 12/12 so I set the end date for 1/12.) At this point, everything was fine and dandy — we started to see some clicks almost immediately. Oddly enough, the system went into a “budget pause” about 7 days later and I thought nothing of it. I figured it was trying to balance out the remaining money to help it spread the love over the one month period. I happened to look at my American Express statement 3 days ago and suddenly noticed that about $135 had been charged by AdCenter. (WTF?!) I logged back into the account to find that the “budget pause” had resumed on Jan 1, 2007 and the budget had reset to $200 again. By now, we had racked up $205 worth of charges between 1/1 and 1/5 and the system was now in a “budget pause” again.

In layman’s terms: AdCenter uses the 1st of every month as the start of a new month. Since I had opened my account on 12/12 and set the end date as 1/12, I had effectively told them to run my campaign for two months. The funny thing is, they didn’t mention this anywhere on the site!

I just spent 30 minutes on the phone with a support representative just now that told me that I should have called in sooner if I wasn’t sure how the system worked and that they were greatful for my feedback. She then proceeded to help me close my account without any further questions. Oh — and before I forget, she even told me that I technically owed a little over $5 more but that they would “round that down” for me. Gee, thanks Microsoft!

Synopsis: Stick to Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter sucks — or atleast their customer service does.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft AdCenter, Google AdWords, online advertising, SEO

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 11:15 am and is filed under General. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.