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An affiliate friend of mine let me in on an experience that he had with Microsoft adCenter that typifies why they will never seriously take on Google. Here's the transcript of the back and forth:
Here's some of his ad rejection gems from adCenter:
"Ad rejected due to collection of Personally identifiable information but failure to provide adequate contact details.(I.e. Landline number or address.)"
"The site takes PII but does not provide contact details or a privacy policy."
"Ad copy & site claim that reg cure can fix problems with the (error type) application which is specific to computers running linux."
"Ad rejected due to collection of PII but failure to provide adequate contact details.(I.e. Landline number or address.)"
Here's the affiliate's email response to Microsoft:
J—,
Thanks for sending this to me.
Some of the rejections appear to be because the site does not have a privacy policy. The site does have a privacy policy, and has for several weeks. It is linked to from every single page on the 'xyz'.com domain, including landing pages, from the footer nav. It can be found here: http://www.'xyz'.com/privacy/ .
In addition to the functional contact form that is already on the site, I have placed the physical address of the company on the website under the "Contact" page.
I will not add a phone number. I do not have the resources or inclination to answer phone calls from the 5,000 visitors that reach this site every single day. As part of my affiliate agreement with ParetoLogic, the owner of RegCure, all customer and technical support is handled by their 40-person support staff. Turnaround time is under 24 hours. Instructions for contacting them can be found in the product itself.
I hope that it is not official policy to require companies with 2 employees that receive thousands of hits per day to list their phone numbers.
As far as the reason for the rejection of the "error-type" advertisements: While I appreciate your policy team taking the time to become experts on the RegCure product and its functionality, they are completely incorrect in saying that this problem is specific to Linux. I am able to reproduce it on two different machines running different versions of Microsoft Windows, and am not able to produce the error at all on my Linux systems. Furthermore, my site statistics show that 95% of the visitors to this landing page are running some version of Microsoft Windows. Is it common for your policy team to offer advice and opinions regarding the efficacy of products that your advertisers are promoting?
I appreciate you keeping me updated with this. Please push this back to your policy team as soon as possible.
Thanks,
Now, I can respect that Microsoft wants to have a "quality" system like Google so they can keep their system from becoming spammer city, but come on…
There are plenty of legitimate advertisers who have just flat-out given up on trying to work with adCenter. When you have one of the only viable alternatives to an effective monopoly on search advertising you have a real opportunity: an opportunity to grab offer a quality yet flexible platform that goes out it's way to WORK with advertisers instead of throwing up walls. It's like Yahoo! having buckets of pattern data from services like Del.icio.us, flickr, mybloglog, and never using it to noticably improve search relevancy. What a waste.
Add to all this the fact that Microsoft openly mocks affiliate businesses, you realize old habits die hard. Microsoft has been treating users like sheep for so many years, why not do it with legitimate advertisers as well…
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