SuitcaseLifestyle.com

So a while ago, I was contacted by someone from MSN Adcenter asking if I’d be interested in the assistance of a ‘Search Specialist’ to import my existing advertising campaigns into MSN Adcenter. At the time my main focus was Adwords, as there was tons of volume and I was still busy optimizing my campaigns there. My previous efforts on Adcenter provided too little volume, so I had given up. The only condition was that I was willing to spend $500 a month. No problems…

I was actually impressed that Adcenter made this effort to reach out and offer this service, I’m not a fan of the mighty Google so I welcome with open arms any other platform that is willing to compete with them. I also figured since every advertising platform is complicated and has it’s own different ways of operating, this ‘Search Specialist’ might point out a few things I didn’t know. So we scheduled a call…

The call I had with the Adcenter specialist was very long, unnecessary 2 hours. We started off discussing my sites, types of products and what kind of advertising I currently do. All well and good, then we moved on to their platform and what they hope to help me achieve, very good. Moving on, I was asked how my campaigns are currently set up in Adwords(for search network, a metric fuckton of keywords including misspellings in exact match, 1 keyword per adgroup). I was told this approach wouldn’t work so well with Adcenter, and that they would prefer to make new campaigns from scratch… I decided to leave it in their hands. The reason the call took 2 hours, was because they for some reason had to explain to me many things I already knew, which was kind of annoying, as I have more important shit to do, perhaps they just needed to make sure I understood how they were going to blow my money.

Now a week after my call with the ‘Search Specialist’, they called me back to say everything was ready, so I could go in and swap the links for tracking links and turn the ads on live. So I log in, and one of the first things I had to do was rewrite all the ad copy. I also had to delete about 25% of the keywords they used, because they weren’t relevant to my niche. Overall I thought the campaign was poorly made, and I could of made a better one in 15 minutes, but what the hell, different platform, different rules right? I decided to just turn it on and let it burn some money and let the results speak…

I let the campaigns burn through a few hundred dollars and came back to see how they went. Overall $400 spent for 5 conversions, resulting in a $80 CPA. Not very good when my average sale is $50. Search Specialist? I think not, but I still give them a B for effort.

I deleted their rubbish and launched my own small campaign. Only 10 keywords in one adgroup, 3 types of ad copy in rotation. After spending $500, my CPA without any optimization, was $22.

In conclusion

Forget contacting Adcenter for the assistance of a ‘Search Specialist’. Do it yourself. But most of all, make sure you use Adcenter! The volume is no where near close to Google Adwords, but the traffic converts so much better. You are leaving money on the table if you aren’t using MSN Adcenter.