MSN vs Google

So today I started my first MSN adCenter (aka Bing) campaign. As a veteran user of Google Adwords and Yahoo Search, I was excited to see what adCenter could offer me, especially after the big Yahoo announcement.

Setting up an account was easy enough (although it would be nice if you could easily import your Adwords or other PPC data), and was pretty beginner-friendly (seems like it was designed with the not-so-savvy small business owner in mind). However, I was confused why you have to pay a $5 account setup fee. I just typed in all my information and financial info into your site, shouldn't I be getting paid if anyone should be? Just the first red flag in my new adCenter relationship.

Thanks to the flexibility of Adwords, I was able to export my current keywords (all 2,000 of them for this specific campaign) and easily paste them into adCenter, which saved me some time. I wish Google could transfer my account's keyword performance as well, but no dice :(

The next thing about adCenter that struck me as odd was the ad creator. It was similar to the Adwords ad creator, however you could type more characters per line than was really allowed (per adCenter rules), click "Submit", and have to wait for the page to reload to tell you that you were X syllables long. Adwords does this AS YOU TYPE. I'm pretty sure that is easy to do.

Later this afternoon, I signed back in to adCenter (after seeing little to no action on my very popular keywords throughout the day) to find that my account status was "Budget Paused".

First of all, I had to use Google search to figure out what "Budget Paused" meant. There was no little icon next to the staus (like Google uses) for a tooltip with answers. There was no mention of "Budget Paused" in adCenter's help section. I had to use Google search to find the adCenter blog.

According to the adCenter blog, adCenter will automatically pause your campaign (and set the status to Budget Paused) in order to not go over your daily spend. Problem was, adCenter was $250 short of my daily spend today. And, now I can't do anything about it. There is no way to "Resume" the campaign.

There are other problems with adCenter, such as no verification for conversion tracking code, but I will spare you the details.

The point is, MSN needs to step up in a big way if they ever hope of competing with Google. More time needs to be put in developing the interface and system functionality than running TV ads. Bing will never suceed without improving its interface, because people who use the system day in and day out will just take their budget and put it in Adwords.