Mr. Greyhat | Adventures into the world of Search Marketing with Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

So, here i am playing with the adCenter desktop beta. I’ll chronical my experience:

1. I signed up and downloaded and installed without Administrator priviledges, I was told I would need them. I didn’t.

2. It’s downloading all the accounts now (45 accts), some of them are large but it’s moving quickly. The account download process is definitely faster than adwords editor at this point.

System requirements

Microsoft adCenter Desktop requires the following system configuration:

Component	Minimum requirement
Operating system	PC running a 32-bit version of Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Vista Administrator permissions required Microsoft adCenter Desktop does not run on 64-bit versions of Windows Microsoft adCenter Desktop installs Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Redistributable Package
Processor	32-bit processor required; 64-bit processors are supported
Memory	1 GB of RAM
Hard-disk space	250  MB of available hard-disk space
Web broswer	Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or later
Internet connection	Dial-up or broadband Internet access required during installation and for subsequent exchanges of data with Microsoft adCenter online
Microsoft adCenter account	Microsoft adCenter user name and password required during installation and for subsequent exchanges of data with Microsoft adCenter online

 

… only keywords left to download now..

 Thoughts so far- a more relevant progress bar would be really good. Something that shows numbers or actual percentages. A brief look at the api makes me think this would be very possible.

 

Ok, i’ve got it.

 

This is actually very nice. Grouping related accounts into sub accounts in a tree. Ad text is easy to change. It seems to crash extremely easily, unfortunately. Themenu system is very 2007officey, and it’s nice and clean. I’ve made a text ad change, and it uploaded very easily.  Adding a keyword is very easy although I’m not a huge fan of having to click ’save’ after every change. In adwords, a change is just saved in the interface.

 

Grabbing stats is  fairly slow, and you can only use preset periods of time.  Infact - I couldn’t get any stats at all. I think it’s likely that it is grabbing stats for all of the 50 or so accounts I have listed. This is fairly inefficient, and it should grab stats on the fly..

 

Currently there is no reporting tab, as there isn’t one in AdWords. It’s clearly based directly on adwords editor.

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 9:55 am and is filed under general ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.