Searching Beyond the Paid

Thursday, September 11, 2008

5 Feature Requests for MSN adCenter Desktop

Back at SMX Advanced in June, a pleasant conversation with the adCenter rep at their booth led to an invite for me to try the adCenter Desktop tool. This is a feature that SEMs have been requesting for a long time, and I was excited to try it out.

I've been using the tool for a couple of months now, and overall, it's a big timesaver. It helps me update campaigns quickly and easily, and actually has gotten me to include more clients in MSN. Yahoo is now the lone major PPC without a desktop editor.

That said, I have a couple of major feature requests:

1. Please, please, please get rid of the "save" requirement in the "manage" section where we make all our updates! I cannot count how many times I've made a bunch of changes, and forgotten to hit "save," only to lose all my work when I navigated away from that screen. UGH! I guess I'm just used to working in Adwords Editor, which doesn't require a Save, but it is cumbersome and unnecessary. adCenter Desktop already has the "revert changes" feature, so there is no need to make us save our work as we go along. Please!

2. Include a "help" section within the tool. We're all new to using this - don't make us guess what "deep copy" and other functions will do, please.

3. Warn users when accounts cannot be downloaded because the user is not logged in with the correct adCenter user name and password. We recently changed our password due to staff turnover, and it took me several tries to figure out why the Desktop tool stopped working. It just wouldn't download changes - there was no message telling me why.

4. Allow us to change ad group status from "draft" to "active" within the desktop tool. If this is possible, I can't figure out how to do it (see #2 above). I had to log in to adCenter to activate an ad group I set up in Desktop, which defeats the whole purpose of using a desktop editor.

5. Allow mass delete of {param1} keyword destination URLs. Again, if this is possible, I can't figure out how to do it. I needed to remove keyword destination URLs for a client's ad group yesterday, and it should have taken 5 minutes in Desktop. Alas, no such luck - I had to log in to adCenter, download the ad group to Excel, make the change, and re-upload the file - again, defeating the purpose of using a desktop editor.

I started a thread on Desktop at Search Engine Watch, but so far, I'm hearing crickets. Am I the only one out there who's using this? Am I the only one using adCenter?? If you've tried Desktop, post your feedback at SEW, or in the comments here!

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