Comments on: Unhappy MSN AdCenter Customer

By: Ditkaman

Ditkaman — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:02:22 +0000

As a Project Manager in a web development company, the emails Mystery Man sends are a Red Flag for me. He’s clearly a difficult, impatient customer and (no offense intended) he comes off as rather arrogant by only the second email.

Personally, I am not shocked the rep didn’t respond to the veiled threats (I’ll blog your letter? Rreally?) and the general attitude. I wouldn’t have either.

Sounds to me like the kind of client I would politely ask to move on. Clients this difficult this early on will drain your human resources and patients.

By: adamap

adamap — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 21:47:31 +0000

My opinion is the quality and quantity of MSN traffic is acceptable but the interface still has a way to go as does the client support. The nuts and bolts type support is pretty good. The ‘how do I do…’ type of request. But the account strategy assistance is lacking.

The Quick Launch program is just that, a short engagement, basically setting up n00bs. That is a knock on MSN is the difficulty in getting a dedicated account manager to provide real strategy which Mystery Man was looking for.

By: Mel66

Mel66 — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 16:17:52 +0000

Sharing max CPCs with MSN might not be giving away proprietary data, but it might be irrelevant. Every engine performs differently, so max CPCs will naturally vary from engine to engine (assuming you are tracking your ROI and setting bids accordingly). And if you’re testing an engine for the first time, you might want to bid conservatively anyway.

What I usually do is ask the engine rep to provide me with recommended max CPCs for each keyword. Then I can decide whether those fit my parameters or not, without sharing info that might be considered sensitive and probably isn’t relevant anyway.

The fact that it took MSN over 5 days to respond to Mystery Man’s email is poor service, imho. The rep should have called him and talked it over, or at least emailed him in a more timely manner. You never know when a $200 test can turn into a $200K annual spend…..

Melissa

By: DavidW

DavidW — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 16:12:18 +0000

I had to read the email exchange through twice. All the AdCenter rep is asking for, as far as I can see, are the fields that are necessary to upload the spreadsheet into AdCenter. The maximum CPC is a required field for this, and it’s usually down to the customer to decide what that is.

Most people I know would import their Google campaigns into MSN, Yahoo, etc. in this manner, and, if they’re like me, would tweak their maximum CPC according to the engine concerned.

MSN performs well for us, just wish there was more volume.

MysteryMan has overreacted IMHO.

By: DazzlinDonna

DazzlinDonna — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 19:11:37 +0000

See, I had a feeling there would be opposing viewpoints, which is why I asked for your thoughts. I’m an organic kinda gal (in terms of SEO), so I wanted to leave it up to you PPC experts to comment on this. Glad I did.

By: David

David — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:56:06 +0000

It seems like MysteryMan had a bit of an overreaction to the adCenter rep’s email. If he didn’t want to provide that information, he could’ve just said so and left it at that. When I’ve dealt with reps at Google and Ask, they’ve also asked me what I’m spending at other engines. Publishers do that — it’s a common tactic. It’s up to the buyer not to reveal that data.

And then to assume that not providing the data is a dealbreaker — like I said, MysteryMan is obviously someone who thinks higher of himself than he should. Seriously, he got asked a question that is often asked in advertising, and he takes it as a personal affront. Get serious.

By: DazzlinDonna

DazzlinDonna — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:33:57 +0000

hoffmyer zoodigan (love that name, btw), i’ll be happy to post the flip side of this story, if anyone wants to share one with me. so, anyone with a happy story to counter this one about adcenter, feel free to share it. if its quick, post it here in the comments. if it’s long and involved, send it via email, and i’ll make a proper post out of it.

By: hoffmyer zoodigan

hoffmyer zoodigan — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:18:52 +0000

“do you know how much I spend!?!?!” Please, just work for a low spend SEM (who doesn’t have one these days?)you think the world owes you something.

I’ve read the emails, nowhere did they ask for your conversion data or anything that could be considered confidential in nature. You are crying about giving your cpcs – really? That’s your big gripe? I think you are just a MSFT hater and would have trashed them regardless of what happened. If they gave you max CPCs you would have scoffed “that’s too high what do you think I’m just going to throw money at you.”

It’s clear from your emails however, that you didn’t want to give adCenter a chance. At no point did the rep change the tone to warrant such anger and hatred from you.

If it makes you feel any better, you probably wasted $200 worth of the rep’s time dealing with you. I suggest you reavaluate your gameplan with dealing with the engines. Not a good way to make friends.

PS – Donna, shame on you for having a slow day to post the rant of one customer. We all know that bad news travels faster than good.

By: Aaron Lauper

Aaron Lauper — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:26:27 +0000

The story seems odd in that adCenter is being judged entirely based on the service of a rep in the $200 budget service level.

Where did the rep as for all this personal information from the Google account? Seemed to me that the rep was asking for account structure, previously created campaigns/ads/kw so they could do a proper comparison.

Aaron

By: MysteryManB

MysteryManB — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 13:20:18 +0000

The Microsoft AdCenter customer service is awful. I recentally closed my account there due to a similar problem. I’m not going to fight that hard to give such a small player my money. Here’s hoping they never become big enough that I have to work with them.