In the race to the top, it appears that the search engines may
be innovating too fast for their own good. It seems that these days, each engine
is frantically rushing to add features, improve current operations or even
completely re-invent itself. The updates are frequent, and often come at the
cost of one of the most important aspects of search – real time access to data.
Last week there was a day when I was unable to pull up-to-date reports from MSN,
and could not log into Google AdWords.
The competition
among the engines is fierce, both in terms of gaining share of searches and
advertiser approval. This competition has driven a healthy environment that
embraces updates and improvement of features and service. This is great for the
advertisers and the consumer as it allows for better experience for both.
However, the speed at which these features are being sent into the marketplace
is a bit too fast for even the engines that are releasing the features to
handle, leading to unnecessary problems.
MSN was set to
release what was supposed to be a much more user friendly adCenter. It boasted
of an easier to use interface and the ability to bulk download. However, when I
logged in on Monday morning and it took an hour and a half to pull a simple week
report. We were informed that there was a slight delay in the reporting, but it
was expected to be repaired by the afternoon. It was not fully resolved until
Thursday of that week. This was not the first major issue however, a few months
earlier the engine had dropped all of the DMA-targeting for one of our accounts.
Needless to say, this was quite a large issue, but was luckily caught and
resolved quickly.
MSN is not the only
engine experiencing difficulties, however. It seems that Google has been
subject to a number of bugs recently as well. Last week I was unable to use the
keyword tool, reports would not run, and all of AdWords moved at a snail’s pace.
Earlier a bug between our bid tool and the AdWords Editor resulted in URL
updates to actually post as additional creatives. Big Problem. We are told that
the problem should be resolved with the next release of AdWords.
It’s
not only the Tier 1’s that are affected either. We launched a campaign on a Tier
2 last week only to find that the engine also did a complete site re-launch on
the same day. A bug resulted in a user clicking on an ad only to have it appear
in a pop-up window with no navigation. Again, we were told that the bug would be
resolved shortly.
In the end, the enhanced features and the new
marketing opportunities that the engines offer are greatly appreciated. However, it seems that as the
engines are caught up in the race to ever improve, they may be losing sight of
one of the more important feature of search – the opportunity to understand how
the market is moving in real time. For large customers, these periods without
access to that valuable data can cost thousands of dollars an hour.
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