Forum Moderators: werty
We check our daily stats every morning at 8:30 for the previous day, that is, until they got way behind about 6 days ago.
So somehow ONE keyword got entered at $11 per click, while all the other keywords in that campaign was .11 cents per click, resulting in $1,200/day charges for the last 3 days - a $3,000 loss for us.
I called MSN, and they are having their engineers look into it.
I was able to track the problem down on the morning of day 3 because hourly reports are available for the previous day, but not a daily summary (which makes absolutely no common sense).
Based on other posts on WebmasterWorld, I don't want to pause my campaigns because I don't know how long they will take to resume.
I'll let everyone here know what happens - will MSN credit us back for the overage, or will we have to lose this money because their reporting is broken?
- The budget was originally set at $1,000/month
- I discovered the overage at the $2,500 mark (already $1,500 over the budget AND STILL RUNNING!)
- When I tried to change the keyword back down to .11 cents, the system FORCED ME TO UP MY BUDGET TO $3,000/MONTH!
- I lost an additional $1,000 yesterday.
- The rep tells me that it may take a week or more to research and see if I will be credited anything
- She said that if it's our fault that the keyword was $11 rather than .11 cents that we won't get a refund.
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So in summary:
- MSN will not honor your budget and turn off your spend when it's met
- MSN's daily reporting system doesn't work
- MSN's system will force you to up your budget even if you are backing down on your CPC
- MSN's system doesn't respond in real time to changes - it has taken more than 24 hours for the change I made in the CPC to take effect.
Buyer Beware
BTW--I'm not sure if I entered 27 or .27 or if their system does something squirrely to cause it.
One of our clients was overbilled by $2,200.
Watch your accts. If this happens, don't panic. Call Microsoft Support (they have real people who answer the phones, in contrast to "that other leading service"). Be ready for this: they're friendly. Don't panic. You're probably just not accustomed to that.
Explain what happened. They'll look into it and issue you a refund. It takes a few days, but you'll get updates by email and phone.
Okay, adCenter is buggy. They're working on it. Hey, it's just like the good ol' days with Adwords, when we were filing bug reports every few hours.
sent my budget at 5,000 month / 30 = $166.00 Daily Max.
set click price to 0.19 - came back next day to see I had spent 1,600.
MSN ignored my bid and had me at an avg of $2.75 PER CLICK!
Of course that put me in the #1 spot and i collected over 600 clicks. I complain and they say they only give credit.
HUH! - YOUR system is buggy, doesnt work properly, doesnt do a proper budget pause. inflates my click price by 1400% and you only wanna give me credit and i have to AMEX CASH!
Tell Bill I can't finance his crack habit!
'Our "engineers" are looking into it' is the standard response (although they have been nice about it).
The technician I spoke with said that neither he nor I could speak to a manager if we are unable to get a resolution on this issue - there is no second tier to appeal overcharges to.
If adCenter411 would weigh in on this, I would appreciate it very much...
Unless you have screenshots of your monthly budget before you increased it to lower your bids you won't get anywhere.
It's pretty clear that it's adcenter's fault that they let your spend go over your set monthly budget. But you have to change your monthly spend to be allowed lower your bids which means there's no record of your orignal monthly budget.
Now, if you had left your bids at there really high bid amount and didn't change your budget and just let the spend keep going up and up you would get a refund.
So if it happens to anybody else don't touch anything and report the problem. Then I guess you will get a refund?
It's pretty stupid because you can set up an account with 1,000's of keywords with $10 bids per keyword with No. 1 positions and a monthly budget of say $200. After a couple of weeks when you've clocked up $10,000 over your monthly budget just report it and get a full refund.
They know there monthly budget spend doesn't work very well but won't fix it or entertain that there's a problem with it.
I hope you get somewhere with it but I somehow doubt it!
Unfortunatly this was the finals of american idol and he had bid on all the contestents names.
FORTUNATLY he only had a 5,0000 limit on the credit card on file.
He called msn and told them he did not obviously intend to bid 50$ on these keywords but rather .05.
The charges were credited to his card 1 month later.
It's amazing to me that MSN might want to forgo my $6,000/month budget for a 3 day take of $3,000.
I even let them know that we're willing to take a credit rather than a refund if they prefer, since we'll spend it over the next 15 days.
I'll keep everyone updated - still no word today!
They said they would be finished by 5pm Pacific time, but then we just got an email stating that they were unable to finish the inquiry today.
An expensive $748 lesson in "Beware of Crappy Interfaces". those 651 clicks generated $126.00 in sales so i get spanked for $622.00 - Ouch!
It pisses me off 'cause i've used almost EVERY ppc interface available and never made a pricing setting error. MSN would rather stick us then admit the fact that their interface is a buggy nightmare and 'forgive' these beta-test slips.
..and on top of that - they only wanna give credit. Grrrrr!
Watch your budgets!
Is there anyone who you can hire to do auditing of this sort of thing? I am not really good with checking it all as I don't fully understand their reports and system. And even then, I think the reports are sometimes incorrect or contain errors/omissions.
We spend a little less than $350/day there, so I think this is something we really need to get on to!
Any suggestions on auditing?
They are still looking into the overcharge - it's been almost 3 weeks now.
And on the other side of the fence...
Google is building the largest Big Brother machine this side of Hitler,
while also being the responsible big brother and losing out on Millions in potential Arbitrage revenue to clean up the system!
What the hell is going on these days?
The sky is falling!
In any other business the amount of money PPC advertisers spend would justify much, much, better service. For example, if I buy a Mercedes Benz for $1000/month i get incredible service. If anything is wrong they are totally willing to do anything to make it right, give me a spare car, pick me up, whatever. Yet, you can spend $5000 a month with a PPC company like Google, MSN, or Yahoo and they treat you like you're wasting their time when you have a problem. Just seems weird.
I know people who spend six figures with these companies and they still get the same canned e-mails I get. In any other business that type of service would not be tolerated considering the amount of money being spent.
They are "still looking into it", while we continue to spend $6,000 a month on adCenter.
I like the previous post. Acura / Lexus treats you like a VIP when you pay $800-1,000/month for their cars. I spend $6,000/month at MSN, and they treat me like a loser because THEIR system was programmed in Singapore and it sucks.
At 30 days, I'm pausing all of my campaigns until they refund my money.
I used to be a Microsoft advocate while everyone else was blasting them (Micro$oft) - I'm changing my mind.
Yesterday evening 8 of my 9 keyword pages were set to $29.22 a click, an act I did not employ!
It ate up my total monthly budget before I realized what was happening! I typically bid .08 cents a keyword...
I contacted adcenter support by email this morning and am anxiuously awaiting a response.
There are also other glitches and dumb reports I do not understand.
I do not need this kind of crap on a friday, or any other day for that matter. But up until now adcenter has made me money.
I will keep this up to date!
MSN offered to credit us back $179
Their glitch cost us $2,000+, EVEN IF IT WAS COMPLETELY OUR FAULT AND WE HAD ACCIDENTALLY SET THE CLICK AMOUNT TO $11.00/CLICK. However, we didn't do this - all of our other keywords in the campaign were .11/click.
To recap - we had a monthly budget cap of $1,000 and MSN blew past the budget over a 3 day period to charge us $3,200 while their daily stats were unavailable.
Be very afraid of the adcenter monster.
Their system sucks, and YOU will pay for it.
That is not an acceptable solution.
They know theres a problem, and are working on it!
I was asked to reset my bids all to 10 cents and save it, this worked for a bit but after logging in after about an hour or so; first page .08 and 2-9 pages set at 29.22. Reset to 0.10 again, this time emmediately back to .08 and 29.22 again! So the problem is deffinately at their end.
Sent in more info. to adcenter support last night. Now I wait...
At least my campaign is paused, but I better keep checking that as well!
