Maximize Your Holiday Sales With adCenter

I tend to focus a lot on AdWords in this blog. Why...AdWords, at least in most cases on the projects I'm involved in, delivers more conversions than Yahoo and adCenter combined. That may not be the case in all markets but it's common place in everything I'm involved in.

Anyway, as search marketers most of us get a chance to really shine in Q4, especially as we move past Thanksgiving and into the shopping frenzy known as December. I tend to pull out all the stops in late November and all of December in order to generate every cost effective conversion I possibly can. During the rest of the year, under time and resource constraints, it sometimes doesn't make sense to focus limited resources on distribution channels that produce limited returns. In Nov/Dec though, even platforms that struggle to produce significant volume during the other 10 1/2 months of the year really ramp up as shoppers flock to the Internet to make those holiday purchases.

That said, look to adCenter for additional holiday sales. Since it's inception adCenter, once again at least for me and the projects I'm involved in, has at minimum equaled the larger networks in terms of conversion rates and in most cases at a more cost effective cost per conversion. If you don't spend a lot of time using adCenter or have never bothered opening an account here's some adCenter information to help you get started, or, bring you up-to-date with adCenter news and program developments:

Official adCenter Resources
adCenter Signup
adCenter Support
adCenter FAQ
adCenter Blog
adCenter Labs (really, really cool tools)

adCenter Forums
Official adCenter Forums
Digital Point adCenter Forums
WMW adCenter Forums
Search Engine Roundtable adCenter Forums
Search Engine Watch adCenter Forums

adCenter Resources
adCenter Custom Search Engine
adCenter Topics on Search Engine Land
adCenter Topics on the Search Engine Roundtable

adCenter Ads Far From "Quality"

Since I shut off my adCenter campaigns last week I've been watching the paid results at MSN for the term "gold watches". The results were being overrun by MFA's last week (which all appeared to be owned by the same person/company) and shortly after I posted the results *appeared* to be back to normal.


I looked again this morning to to my dismay the same junk is back in the back in the paid results. Check out the # 1 result for "gold watches":


Of course clicking on the ad doesn't actually bring you to getmore.com. You end up at httX://www.bracketclip.info/gold/. Nice ad text too...

What really irks me about this is how many legitimate (ie - killing on other search engines) ads I've had denied in adCenter over the past year. I understand that things slip through and people try and game the system (happens at Google & Yahoo as well) but to me this seems so blatant and obvious that I'm amazed these ads are still making it to the top spots in adCenter.

I've really only been looking at one term...would hate to think what I could dig up with a few hours of research. If you're using adCenter are you seeing this same junk in your vertical? If so, has it impacted your traffic levels or conversion rates?

Related: Does MSN Get It?

adCenter’s New Quality Based Ranking has Issues

On April 16th adCenter introduced "Quality Based Ranking".

Since then, like others, my traffic has dropped. Looking at what adCenter is now showing for ads makes me wonder if this "quality based ranking" update is a complete flop. The ads I'm seeing being served by adCenter now are the worst I've ever seen...on any search engine.

I'm not going to post 100 examples (just search on MSN/Live yourself and you can find plenty of your own) but did one to post at least one example query to demonstrate just how messy the paid results are right now.

Term: gold watches. (screenshot here as ads may change)

Paid result # 1 - display url (www.officialsite.com) does not match destination url (www.amazon.com).

Paid result # 2 - display url (www.seeourtsite.com) does not match destination url (www.amazon.com).

Paid result # 3 - display url (www.mainsite.com) does not match destination url (www.amazon.com).

Paid result # 4 - display url (www.popsearch.com) does not match destination url (www.fastsearchs.info/gold.htm ). The actual landing page is 3 blocks of adsense and some garbage text.

Paid result # 5 - display url (www.bestsearchs.com) does not match destination url (www.informations4you.info/gold.htm). The actual landing page is 3 blocks of adsense and some garbage text.

Paid result # 6 - display url (www.bestbuy.com) does not match destination url (www.girl-hot.info/watches/). The actual landing page is 3 blocks of adsense and some garbage text.

Results 7 & 8 go the same kind of garbage landing pages.

I'm seeing this same stuff - and a lot of the same sites - across dozens and dozens of search terms. I even checked a few places where I'm competing and my ad - which actually includes the keywords and brings people to real pages with real content - sits in spots 6 - 8 behind some of the same sites highlighted above.

adCenter team, I hope what I'm seeing is part of what appears to be a failed quality based ranking update that can be rolled back or fixed quickly. I can't even justify leaving adCenter active at this point as I don't want my ads/services associated with the garbage that's showing up the paid results right now.

Stop adCenter e-mail notifications

In one of my accounts everything is paused right now while I work through some issues. Despite that, I received between 50 - 75 editorial status e-mails this weekend, and, they are still flowing in this morning.

If there's a review of my account going on that's cool...but there has to be a way some of this info can be summarized before it's sent. It's just not realistic to expect your customers to wade through e-mail after e-mail after e-mail...

Is there any way to "opt out" of editorial related e-mails from adCenter?