» Posted on December 21st, 2005
» Filed under MSN
» 24 comments

So I decided it’s time to jump in and learn this PPC thing. I simply know too many people making money on it to let another day pass without getting in on the game. MSN was kind enough to invite me to the AdCenter pilot program. My plan is to blog my AdCenter Adventure as I learn PPC from the MSN point of view. I hope some of you come along for the ride and learn along with me and I’d imagine along the way we’ll uncover some cool and not so cool pieces of AdCenter. Keep in mind I’m not planning on reading any instructions or tips along the way. We’ll see how intuitive the interface is.

Let’s begin….

I followed the url to sign up and 30 seconds later after entering my info and allowing MSN to charge my credit card for $5 to activate my account I’m staring at this screen:

The next couple screens are really straight forward – pick your region (Singapore or US for now) and any dayparting you’d like. They have several predefined times of the day to choose from. So I picked some times I felt would be relevant for the product I’m testing with and, of course, turned my ads off at night.

Next up is selecting your keywords. I love their interface for this. The keyword selector is in the top right and you seed it with your base keyword or phrase and it immediately gives you related phrases – much faster than Yahoo or WordTracker’s tools. Then you just click through selecting the terms you want and they are populated into a list in the bottom right. Once you’ve gone through all the phrases you want you click one more button and they move into your main window on the left and you can then manage all the bids on per word basis. I’m running minimum bid for everthing at this point.

Now the creative bit. I’ve blurred my ads because you’d probably mock the creative. Well, that, and I don’t want you to see my market – sorry kids :) There is an ad preview that updates as you type in the ad fields below. Not a big deal but pretty cool to see it real time.

Now we click submit and see the summary.

Ads submitted at 12:28pm PST. I’ll take bets on how long it takes to approve…

That wraps up the MSN AdCenter Adventure Part 1. Relatively painless I must say. Far better than the last time I set foot in the Adwords interface.

ADDED: wow – 6 terms rejected instantly with: ‘Landing page content not relevant,Undesirable content per editorial guidelines’ as the reason. I can sort of see some of them but one in particular makes no sense at all. They basically told me that a site about dogs is not relevant for the term puppies (a fair comparison to the real terms IMHO).