expertSEM

This week brought the SEM industry quite the Easter Egg when none other than Bill Gates himself announced MSN AdCenter’s new recipe for success… paying users to buy things! The program works like a cash back rebate system for a credit card, refunding some amount of money to buyers on completion of a sale by way of gift certificates redeemable with fine merchants such as “eBay, Barnes & Noble.com, Overstock.com, Sears, Zappos.com, and WPP.”

My first thought is that I recognize all of these merchants–they have some sort of discount deal with every online entity you can think of.  For instance, my healthcare company has a “marketplace” links section where I can find a discount deal for several of these merchants. My credit card company and bank also have links to these and other usual suspects soon to sign on with MSN’s new plan. My point is that if you are shopping at these places, you can already get an upfront discount if you go through any number of affiliate-type deals, so I’m not sure the consumer will be gaining a lot with this affiliate deal.  Another flaw was pointed out by Slate’s Chadwick Matlin regarding price consistency.

Second, and the elephant in my office, all of this is contingent on MSN AdCenter working properly, allowing PPC managers to start accounts, and set up ads fluidly and quickly. The IO process alone makes this a big pill to swallow, but let me just demonstrate how AdCenter behaves on a typical May afternoon. (full disclosure, I grabbed the first screenshot a day later when it was working properly again).

This is how AdCenter is supposed to look:

Great right? Looks like a more or less functional interface. For me, that lasted about two adgroups into creating a new campaign before the rails started coming off the whole thing. Pretty soon it looked like this:

Whoa!, where did all the html go? That’s right, it started just going to the site’s wiry undercarriage without the pretty chassis to impress me. Well, it was still functioning, so I just plugged away through another adgroup until…

Yep, another error message, the second one in a week, which is saying a lot as I almost never get them from Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, or any of several tier B engines.

So, no matter how much they are paying people to shop at Zappos, the Achilles heal of Microsoft’s online initiatives is, and has been, AdCenter’s persistent glitches and general difficulty to use.  Until that changes, I find it highly unlikely that their grand schemes will pay off.