MSN Planning a Big Upgrade to adCenter

A few months ago I had a first look at MSN's adCenter and while mostly I was a fan, it still had some flaws. Well, it looks like Microsoft is listening to the people, MSN has planned a large upgrade to adCenter within the next two weeks in order to make some major changes. According to the MSN adCenter blog some highlights of this next release are:

1. Order creation process simplified into 4 steps
2. Broader differentiation between campaigns and orders
3. New pricing tab includes all budget, bidding, and incremental pricing
4. Negative keywords can be applied at the order level
5. Keyword / ad rejections include reason codes…

Additional changes and a little more detail on the stated changes, I have found the following:
-A redesign of the Campaigns page provides a snapshot of all the orders you have under your campaign.

-You can select audience targets for your ad when you start creating a new order.

-You can now research keywords on the same page where you build your keyword list.
-Targeted bids are now percentage-based so you don’t have to learn a new bidding method.

-Excluded keywords have replaced negative keywords to help you further narrow the audience who will see your ad.

-MSN adCenter API now supports updating order items, as well as targeting orders towards a specific date or time, geographic region, plus age and gender.

-City-based targeting now automatically associates a state or region with your selection. (Tip: make sure to check these associations if you previously targeted a city, as some city names are used in more than one geographic area.)

This all seems very like it will be very helpful and make adCenter a little more user friendly. Most of the PPC world has used Google Adwords or the Yahoo DTC so bringing a little more familiarity to adCenter should be an excellent thing. It is good to see they have actually made good use of all the beta input myself and other testers have given to them.

Specifically, there are two features of adCenter that I've always been a fan of and it looks like they are attempting to improve them; the keyword research tool and demographic targeting. AdCenter's keyword research tool provided very good information for building a campaign but the issue with it was it didn't fit naturally into the work flow. It looks like they have addressed this issue which I am happy to see. Also, a feature unique to adCenter is the demographic targeting which they have tweaked to make it even better. All advertisers, on-line and off-line, know the better you can target your ads the more successful your ad campaign will be.

While there still are some annoyances that I would like to see changed (ie, inability to bulk change keyword bids and to see which ads are running for which words in a group), this should be a very positive upgrade for MSN adCenter. There will be more changes announced later in the week and I will keep you up to speed on them, along with letting you know the date when this upgrade will happen. Currently, all the adCenter folks have told us is "within two weeks" so when an exact date is announced, you'll be the first to know. Hmmm, I wonder if it will work with FireFox?

Side Note *During the release, users will not be able to sign into adCenter, but your ads will continue to be served.*