Recently Denis wanted to upgrade his PC video card since his new game would not work with it, and we decided to get a new computer instead and hand over Denis's PC to Diana.
Along with the new PC we've got a Microsoft adCenter $100 promotion and were dying to give it a try.
Here comes this sad story....
1. Sign-up.
Sign-up process was quite fast, after filling all the personal information and clicking Next button they asked to enter my credit card number and wanted to charge $5 non-refundable fee.
2. Process of creating Campaign, Ad group names, Ads and keywords was actually quite easy with the help of their help system and a couple of videos. I made sure to set Campaign monthly budget appropriately as well as the finish date. Who wants to spend too much?
The adCenter site was very slow and often produced errors like this
In addition It was not an easy task to find out why it displayed "0" balance if I had $100 credit. After waiting for about 2 minutes after clicking on the "Billing" page it displays "No activity for the past 30 days" and that's it... Finally I found this credit somewhere, but it had only two month expiation date (use it or loose it).
3. Approving process.
They say it takes a couple of hours (5) to get my ads/keywords/etc.. approved. After submitting mine I received e-mail from adCenter stating "Your adCenter ads or keywords require changes", then it displayed one of the ads and empty reason of why it was rejected
. Go figure by yourself...
When I go into my account and view my ads they all marked green as Approved, however the campaign state is "Submitted", meaning it's still not displayed anywhere
I'll wait till tomorrow to see if this gets resolved by itself or will require their tech support attention.
7/11/07 Update
Next day when I checked the stats everything was working fine, my intervention was not required. Most of the Ads clicks were related to the trick when you create dynamic text based on the searched keywords like "Find {keyword} Online", where keyword text is replaced by what people are searching on the Net.