Want to see last quarter’s ad spend in Microsoft adCenter? Good Luck.
I run a few different PPC campaigns for an online business. Google adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Search, and Microsft adCenter.
Trying to be a good businessman, I like to track my advertising and other expenses on a quarterly basis. So I go into adCenter and see that I can select various date ranges: Last 3 months, last 6 months, etc:
But I need last quarter which is from 10/1/09 through 12/31/09. No problem, I select Custom Date Range and then enter in these dates. Then I get this:
Er, what? You can’t entered a custom date range longer than 31 days? What the hell? How do I get this data. After fiddling around, here’s the “solution”:
- Go to the Report Center
- Create a Campaign Performance Report
- Set the Unit of Time to be Month
- Set the date range to be Custom.
- Enter Oct 2009 through Dec 2009
And presto here’s the report.
Oh and you have to add up the monthly Spend yourself.
Memo to Microsoft… if you’re competing in the online advertising space, maybe you ought to make it easy for customers to pull out the simple data they need to run their business. I mean you’re hardly worth it as is, compared to adwords, so stop trying to make customers jump through hoops.
Maybe next post I’ll tell you about adCenter’s odd date selection methodology.
