So it seems that half of my blog posts have had me complaining about someone’s interface. If you enjoyed those posts then I have good news, I am just going to run with this theme for a while. Well, at least until I get bored with it. When I started doing internet marketing, the first thing I learned was how to use Google AdWords. AdWords is pretty user friendly and I had no problems learning it. I actually found it quite easy. Then I branched out to MSN adCenter and Yahoos Overture, and they were the exact opposite of easy. But that was many years ago and they obviously have made drastic improvements over the years. Right? While they have become somewhat more user friendly, they are still way behind AdWords (even with their new, unpopular interface). So now that we have decided that Bing is cool, I am going to let MSN know what they need to change in order for adCenter to start having the same appeal.
My first complaint is the fact that it doesn’t offer you the option to save your password. This is something that Linkshare changed in their new interface and I applauded them for it. I go to tons of websites everyday that have my password stored in the browser. If I thought there was a chance of someone ripping off my passwords, I wouldn’t do that. So why don’t you let me decide whether or not I want to store my password, and at least give me the option? There are few things I hate more than having to be slowed down by typing in a password.
Often MSN adCenter, just like Google and Yahoo, will disapprove my ads. Usually this is due to me typing in something wrong so I don’t mind when this happens. However, adCenter give you no help in finding out which ads were disapproved. Instead, it will simply give you a message saying that “Some ads or keywords were disapproved.” This really does nothing to help either of us out. Google has a nice tool that lists the disapproved ads so I know it shouldn’t be too hard for MSN to add this feature. If they told me which ads were disapproved, I could easily fix them and then they would run, resulting in a win-win situation. Instead, I just check the ads that are performing well to make sure that they are ok, and ditch the others, thereby helping neither of us.
Just like Yahoo, MSN adCenter makes it “easy” to import Google campaigns. Please make sure that you notice the quotation marks, because it is a super huge pain. The importing part isn’t too bad. Well, actually it is a pain, but it is doable. The awful part is what comes next. Once you upload your campaign, you have to manually go through each of the steps just like you would if you were starting a new campaign, except this time all the information is already filled out. So if you import 90 ad groups, you have to go through each of the 90 to make them active.
When most people were using dial-up to connect to the internet, I could see the argument for only listing so many items on a page. It made the site load quicker and worked within the bounds of the technology at the time. I don’t see why this still happens. When I look for something on eBay, I want 200 items to show up at a time, not 50. In the time it takes for me to load 4 pages, I could have quickly loaded 1 page with all the items. So I don’t understand why adCenter only loads 50 ad groups at a time, when I have 91 of them. If I am looking for a particular ad group across 3 or 4 accounts, I then have to remember to look on page 2 for it. This is also something that Google’s new interface does, but it at least gives me the option to increase it to 100 ad groups.
With Bing now riding high there is plenty of momentum for MSN right now. If these changes were made it would make me way more likely to recommend it to more people. There are still plenty of other problems that I have with the platform, but I believe that these are the major ones that are holding it back from being user friendly. Is there anything that I missed? Let me know in the comments.
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