You're viewing all posts tagged with microsoft

Firefox 3.x, Safari, and Chrome Not Supported on Microsoft adCenter

I tried to login to Microsoft adCenter today using Google Chrome (my current browser of choice). Then I got this Non-Compatible Browser message:

So Chrome is not supported. Ok, fine. It’s a pretty new browser. So what exactly IS supported then. I click on the link:

Wait. Am I reading this right? The only supported browsers are:

  • Internet Explorer (IE 6, IE 7, and IE 8)
  • Firefox (1.5 and 2.0)

No Firefox 3.x (released 20 months ago… June 2008), No Safari. No Chrome.

But read a little closer. The only operating systems supported are Windows 98, 2000, XP Vista. That means No to Windows 7, Mac OS X and Linux. No to Virtual PC either… whatever that is.

No Macs? Another memo to Microsoft adCenter team: In 2010 lot of creative agencies are mac based and use modern browsers. If you want people to use your advertising platform, make sure you support them.

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”:

  1. Go to the Report Center
  2. Create a Campaign Performance Report
  3. Set the Unit of Time to be Month
  4. Set the date range to be Custom.
  5. 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.