- Seems like a complete rip-off of Google AdWords, from the UI right down to the name
- Kind of irritating that they charge five bucks just to set up an account, maybe it's a low hurdle to keep the riff raff out?
- I don't know how long it takes to get the ads to run, as 24 hours later my innocuous ads for pro camera equipment were still "pending approval" - when I first used Google AdWords two years ago, I was getting traffic from google.com within ten minutes
- There are a couple neat-looking tools, like the charts that show search volumes by gender, psychographic segment, geography, "wealth index," etc. The vast majority of data points are in the "unclassified" column, and I don't know that I'd use this kind of targeting for my ads -- but I don't think Google has anything this fine-grained.
- The user interface is faster and more responsive than AdWords, but it's maddeningly confusing. There's no place that I could find to upload keywords, and once I've laboriously typed in 80 keyword or phrases, I've got to go one-by-one to set broad, phrase or exact match. And once the keywords are in, how the heck do you edit them without deleting and reentering?
- Most maddening of all, when setting up a second campaign, the keyword selection tool completely broke -- all keywords lost, the window looks funky, IE says there's an error on the page, and all navigation broke. Closed the browser, started a new session, logged back in, and it's still broken.
Maybe Microsoft should copy Google on one more thing and name it, "adCenter Beta."
Update 5/5/06 4:03 PM: I'm no longer getting errors when adding keywords, and was able to create a second campaign. But the first campaign I created 48 hours ago is still showing as "pending," and is not showing ads on any Microsoft site yet.
Update 5/7/06 3:46 PM: None of the ads for either of my campaigns is running yet. It's now been nearly *four days* and the campaigns are still showing in "pending" status. There's nothing controversial about the ads or keywords, and the landing pages exist. Does every ad need human review?
Update 5/9/06 9:08 PM: Ads in both campaigns finally started running about 36 hours ago, as far as I can tell. It's probably too early for a fair comparison, but I do have one ad that is identical to one I'm running with Google AdWords. For that ad, Google is delivering about 6 times the number of impressions that Microsoft is in a 24-hour period, but again it's probably too early for a fair comparison.