For the past week I’ve been advertising on Microsoft’s adCenter. From what I’ve been told you can expect lower cost per click, less traffic and 6 times more conversions than on Google Adwords. Here’s a quick review of my findings so far.
Conversion tracking is as unreliable as Adwords. AdCenter has the annoying tendency to record more conversions then you’ve actually made.
I talked to a adCenter rep, yes you can call them, about this issue and they mentioned the reason behind this is that if a customer makes a purchase and then comes back to the thank you page later then it’ll also record that as a conversion. If the customer refreshes that same page it’ll also count as a conversion. Yea, pretty unreliable.
Billing is pretty confusing as well. They have an invisible threshold that once you reach then they’ll automatically charge you. I’m still waiting for answers on this one.
Pausing your campaign doesn’t erase all the history you’ve built up like on Adwords. So you can easily resume a campaign anytime you want and the history stays intact. Pretty nice.
One annoynce I have with this however is that lets say you’ve set your budget at $20 daily. When the $20 budget is met then adCenter automatically pauses your campaign for the day, however for some stupid reason it doesn’t pause completely. So expect it to run till at least $40. Manually pausing it yourself seems to do a better job of stopping the campaign.
Why can’t you view all keywords and all ad copy together? You have to individually go into an adgroup to see them.
AdCenter also has a desktop software like Adwords editor so its a pretty nice software to have if your uploading a big campaign. However as of this moment the the latest adCenter desktop updates are pretty buggy.
Its not all negative however. One powerful aspect of adCenter is the awesome targeting. They’ve got many tools that you can use to precisely target your customers and set incremental bidding. I’m still testing this out to see how reliable it is.
So far I haven’t seen 6 times more conversions and my cost per click is actually higher than it was on Google Adwords. However it seems like my average cost per click is dropping pretty fast. My conversions actually seem pretty normal as well.
I’ll let this run for another week and see how it performs. Be on the lookout for the continuation of this review.
