AdCenter Desktop

Those of us in the UK who have yet to get our greedy little paws on the new AdCenter Desktop application can check out some grabs at the PPC Hero blog.

I had a sneak preview at a recent AdChamps event and will be posting a review and step by step tutorials as soon as we can get hold of a copy.

AdCenter to Penalise Aggregators?

At the recent AdChamps event in London there was a great deal of talk about improving the quality of the search results pages and much of that talk was focussed on the issue of aggregators, price comparison sites and consolidators.

Depending on which side of the fence you’re sitting on the news that AdCenter are to start penalising aggregators with higher click costs will come as quite a shock. I guess it depends on your (or rather Adcenter’s) definition of an aggregator.

Undoubtedly the ads-to-ads pages that simply link from AdCenter to Google Adsense listings are irritating to say the least but what about sites like TravelSupermarket that allow consumers to compare prices from different operators in what is an incredibly fluid marketplace? The popularity of these sites surely indicates that consumers find them to be of real value.

The travel industry in particular is full of consolidators and aggregators of tour operator product. It’ll be interesting to see how AdCenter apply this new quality algorithm and the effect it has on comparison sites including MSN’s own aggregator MSN Shopping!

To be fair to the AdCenter team, the motivation appears to genuinely be to increase the user experience but I guess squeezing extra cash out of high spending accounts such as MoneySupermarket won’t hurt either.

AdCenter Desktop “weeks away”.

Pareto’s 80/20 rule certainly applies to PPC and to AdCenter in particular. Because of the low traffic volumes AdCenter can generate it can often seem that 80% of our effort produces just 20% of our search revenue. Hopefully all this will change when the new AdCenter desktop is launched.
AdWords editor has revolutionised the way most PPC marketers work and saves us countless hours when trying to get repetitive tasks such as mass bid updates through the system. True, you can currently export your data from AdWords Editor into AdCenter through the third party import functionality but it’s still a clunky process.
Having seen a quick preview of the new AdCenter Desktop it does look remarkably (but unsurprisingly) similar to AdWords Editor and that’s no bad thing. Training Staff on PPC in general is time consuming enough but to have to train on two different desktop applications would be yet another burden. Hats off to AdCenter then for not trying to re-invent the wheel.