Rafael Sosa’s Weblog

As one of the beta testers of Microsoft’s Adcenter platform, I have to say that there is a long ways to go before going out of beta, but the product looks promising. At the moment, creating an ad campaign is painfully slow and at sometimes it completely crashes. This flaw alone keeps me from creating any other campaigns. In the process I found myself having to force the back button from my browser, the forward, and waiting a long time to see if the process was computing or just plain lost. These critical flaws must be fixed before Adcenter can aspire to take a big chunk from the current heavy weight champion Google Adwords.

There is light at the end of the tunnel for Adcenter. The overall menu of advertising targeting and specifications blow the competition away. I was amazed at the flexibility of the system to allow for multiple relationships between variables like the variables of time, demographics, and bids. In a campaign, I could bid $0.10 for the keyword “widgets”, but increase my bid to $0.30 for “widgets” if it is being shown to 18-24 year old males from New York on Wednesdays at 6-8PM.  This flexibility is outstanding and it’s something Microsoft can use to gain market share against Adwords – of course, if MS can fix the crawls and crashes.

Everything else from the experience was similar to Adwords and Yahoo’s product. You select a keyword, get related keywords, measure conversions, and estimate the position and amount of traffic expected based on your bid. Microsoft recently announced that they will be adding Adcenter’s client ads to their network of high quality sites. This announcement should place them at a better position of providing much more traffic than just by search. At the end, it will depend much on Microsoft’s capacity to take this product out of beta and aggressively increase their network of sites displaying such ads before Google catches up to the demographic targeting offered by Adcenter.