MSN AdCenter - Very Few Users?

[richardhaigh]

Hi All,

As like most people (according to my referrals logs) Im a big user of google, but searching for something and just getting pages and pages of directories as results im starting to drift a bit and test the water on the other side a little. the New MSN live being my first port of call.

Now as a strong advertiser with Adwords, Yahoo/Overture and recently mirago, i thought i should open an acount with MSN adcenter. Especially becuase it doesent have the minium spend like yahoo! which can be fustrating.

So i went to sign up, the first problem i encountered was i couldnt imput my address fully, i live in Huddersfield in the UK, it wasnt listed in msn's options under state \ provinence. Niether was yorkshire or west yorkshire for that matter, so i went for wakefield (a town nearby). Not too much of a problem, as invoices are all printed off online.

However i then went to credit card options with the only options being Visa or Mastercard, i have a Meastro business card, so i couldnt charge my business account (i prefer meastro becuase the banking charges are cheaper and it comes straight out of my account so i always know where i am). So reluctantly i thought i would put in my personal visa card, ( a real pain becuase it means another expense claim to sort out every month)

Msn then went to verify the card, but becuase the state provinence area was wrong it would not authourise the card!

A quick call to the 7 days a week adcenter informed my it was an american system and they had no way of inputing the relevant data so on this occasion they could not provide payment facilites therefore meaning... there was nothing they can do! and i couldnt advertise on an account basis with them as my projected ad spend of £200 GBP per month was sufficent for them to open an account!


From the UK business user, im not a hapy bunny, most of my sites do rank No.1 - 5 in the natural listings but as always there are variants which i cannot cover without making the site look od and risking incurring spamming the search engines so adwords style campaigns pick up the loose ends.

I also believe (i know i do this) a lot more people are looking directly at sponsored results before natural listings now in order to find relevant results.


The point of the post was to find out if anyone has similar problems and if this is just teething problems, the gentleman on the phone was apologetic and said he would feed my concerns back, but i think it was more of a closing statment to get me off the line.

Do we have any msn live big wigs or contacts that can shed some light on the developmment of business to business relations, this is a potential revenue restrictor and if it was my business it would be a priorty!

Whats everyone elses opinions on this?

[incrediblehelp]

I am not yet a AdCenter user, but soon will be.

[xenu]

I had not heard about the Adcenter before. Interesting - I would love to know a little bit more about it, myself.

[richardhaigh]

adcenter still seems very quiet in my sector, is anyone using it and seeing amazing results, im very recluctnat to use it, especially as i am ranking quite high in the natural listings.

Hower msn is putting a lot of advertising behind its live brand in the UK, so im still interested to see if msn has gained any gound on google and whether its worth going through the hassle of reolving issues with adcenter signup, expecially if im not getting any returns.