adCenter Opens Up Access to Another Round of Testers

Last week, I received an email in my inbox from MSN adCenter telling me that I was part of the next round of testers that were going to be give access to set up a pay-per-click campaign. I spoke with a few folks at SES Chicago that heard the same, so it seems that the next round let quite a few more people in the door. MSN is still showing Overture listings 75% of the time, but new adCenter advertisers will see their listings showing up for about a quarter of the searches run at MSN.

The email gave me two options... the first directed me to sign up by clicking a link in the email. I followed that link and answered half a dozen questions posed by the adCenter site. Once I filled the form out, it spit out the following message:

Success from day one - Let our Marketing Analysts help you plan, create, and optimize your first campaign.

Advertising on MSN Search has never been this easy. With MSN adCenter QuickLaunch, a QuickLaunch Marketing Analyst will assist you with a one-time ad campaign set-up service. Participating in this pilot program will provide you with an opportunity to take advantage of a unique service offering at no-cost. You will also be able to help shape adCenter improvements as a QuickLaunch customer.

How does QuickLaunch work?

• Fill out the QuickLaunch registration form which lets us know that you are interested.
• MSN invites you to participate in the QuickLaunch pilot.
• A QuickLaunch Marketing Analyst will contact you to begin working on your account.
• Use your current P4P campaign information to get started on QuickLaunch - your analyst will guide you through exporting your ads and keywords from Google or Yahoo! and will import them to MSN adCenter for you.
• The analyst will not only use the keywords you already are using, but will also expand your keyword lists to help increase your ad's exposure.
• The analyst will also create an ad for you that follows the editorial guidelines on MSN adCenter.
• Once your campaign has been transferred, the team will contact you so that you can take your campaign live on MSN Search.
• Your QuickLaunch Marketing Analyst will help you optimize your campaign once using MSN adCenter reports during this initial set-up.

Currently participation in the QuickLaunch pilot program is by invitation only. Register today to let us know if you're interested in the QuickLaunch pilot. You will be contacted by a QuickLaunch Marketing Analyst if you are selected to participate.

I'm not a big fan of letting other people setup my pay-per-click accounts, so I popped back over to the email and clicked the second link which took me to a sign-up page that required me to enter my email and then fill out all of my contact information.

The only bug I ran into at this point was that it asked for my credit card number and told me that a "sign-up fee" would be charged to my account. The problem was, they didn't tell me what that fee was. I went and did a little hunting and finally found that it's only $5.00, so I went ahead and completed the sign-up. The nice thing was that on the same page that noted the $5.00 charge, Microsoft explained that they would bill my card AFTER I had racked up charges, much the way that Google's AdWords system does. Users start with a $50 credit, which goes up over time to as much as $2,000. Credit cards are charged every 30 days, or whenever a credit limit is hit.

I'll be playing around with the interface some over the next week or two and will blog my comments as I find things.