Clicks and Bits

Monday afternoon I closed my Microsoft Adcenter account. While many have railed against Microsoft’s attempt to enter the PPC market based upon poor and unconverting traffic, I was happy with the traffic, costs-per-click, and my conversion rates. However, I was fed up with the constant barrage of emails “Your AdCenter ads or keywords require changes.” Any given week, I’d have 10-20 emails alerting me that x number of my keywords are not meeting editorial guidelines.

At least they would let me know what campaign the keywords came from, but one would think it wouldn’t take too much effort to let me know which keyword was disabled.

My real rift with AdCenter though came from my keywords being continuously disabled. It seems they are more than willing to accept my money for a while after initially approving keywords. Then a couple weeks later, boom, 20% of my keywords for a campaign are now ‘Rejected.’ Several times I contacted support to get a manual review of my landing pages and keyword relevancy resulting each and every time in the re-approval of the keywords in question. Only to see them rejected again a couple weeks later.

The final straw came Monday in a phone call with support who told me that they can’t continue to keep manually reviewing my landing pages and keywords because their automated system is obviously detecting anomalies. I was also told that the reason my number one performing keyword (a product name) kept being rejected was because of trademark issues – a trademark I own, mind you.

So let’s see, my product name as a keyword, landing on a page with the product name as the URL, and clearly marked as a trademarked term, is being rejected because my trademarked term is violating my trademark. Okay.

Farewell AdCenter, I’ll keep pumping my money in AdWords and YPN.