I won't waste my time on a Microsoft Adcenter review, but I've encountered some pretty amazing f*ckups in my few weeks of experimenting with it.
First, Microsoft wrongly disabled some keywords. When I appealed to have the keywords reactivated, I had to contact their support 5 times before I finally connected with someone who understood the difference between paid and organic search listings. I actually spoke with two people who were unaware of live.com's existence, let alone how search engines show ads.
Here's one email I received from their support staff. I've placed typos in red:
"I understand that you would like to know why your ads are not appearing on Live.com.
Microsoft adCenter ads only appear on http://msn.search.com or http://adcenter.search.com .
I am sending you a screenshot of were your ads are running using the keyword X as well as the URL to our learning page. If you have any other concerns please feel fee to contact us again."
Besides being unable to spell, their support email actually directs me to search.com, which is not Microsoft.
Just now, I got another email from Microsoft.
"Regarding our email support and it ease of use, i just want to confirm our system requirements. I was looking at your email and it tracks by operating system and internet browser. It suggests that you are using IE7 and currently this explorer is not compatible with Microsoft adCnter. "
Thus, AdCenter doesn't support either of my browsers: IE7 or Firefox. If Microsoft ever wants to approach Google or Yahoo's ad revenue, it's going to have to do an infinitely better job supporting advertisers.
And for one last bit of sadness..it would be easy to blame support problems on outsourcing, but I actually believe adCenter support is based in the US.
