MSN AdCenter Updates: A Work In Progress

Work in progress was the theme of the MSN AdCenter pre SES meeting today. They seem to be taking notes on all the problems keep addressing on the various message boards and they plan to start rolling out feature upgrades.

The next big update to Microsoft AdCenter will be on August 5th, 2006, referred to as the 8-5-6 update.

Here is what they are planning on adding:

* Support for Firefox 1.5 – One less thing for everyone to complain about.
* Cut & Paste – up to 200 Keywords, up from 100
* Filters by Timestamp – this is a fancy way of saying that they are copying the AdWords interface. It will allow you to change the time frame of the report details on the keyword/order/campaign pages. Right now it is showing “life to date” and it will allow you to change it to month to date, last month, etc.
* Reporting Update – They are working making the reporting more up to date, pull the info quicker, etc.
* Various Bug Fixes – all the stuff that people noted on the forums, including getting billed over yopur budget due to delays in their system
* Estimation tool - Improving the estimation tool to be more accurate.

Maybe not in this release, but probably in the next:

* Power Posting – like on Adwords it would allow users to paste in a keyword, url, bid price and parameter.
* Negative Keyword Enhancement – not 100% sure what they are doing on this, but they will be expanding the capabilities of the negative keywords.
* Waterfall Properties – this is the fancy name for adjusting something at a top level and having it apply to the things below it. I will call hieratical preferences…such things as geo targeting, day parting, demographic settings, hopefully negatives, could be applied at a campaign or account level and apply to everything below, rather than having to manually adjust the settings on every order in your account.

Other then that stuff they talked a bit about their contextual network, tools, analytics and some other items…nothing major other than these fixes. MSFT did show some testimonials from adveritsers and I plan to diagnose their business models and see if I can replicate the results for my self (c:

The tools seem to be pretty amazing over at AdCenter Labs. Geddes (TV’s eWhisper) covered one of their keyword tools, their new free analytics program (coming soon), and touched on the contextual hype.
Check out the official MSN Adcenter Blog for more updates.