MSN adCenter Revenue tracking – Soon to Come
For years, MSN adCenter tracking has been a bane to my existence. A large portion of that has been due to the gross inaccuracy of the numbers (somewhat improved with their spring update). And a larger portion has been due to the fact that, even when we ignore the inaccuracy, we still have to deal with the fact that a very key metric is missing. Really MSN, you want us to run an eComm campaign without being able to report revenue?
As has been discussed in this space many times before, ROAS rules life at Rise Interactive. That’s obviously a pretty difficult item to analyze with a null revenue value. And while we can easily report revenue from Adwords and YahooSM, MSN forces us to use a little more effort–GAnalytics and Omniture and HBX and Dart, etc. But it appears that is about to soon change.
Two weeks ago, while working on integrating MSN’s beta API into our online paid search reporting tool, we found adCenter scripts that provided eComm tracking options. Revenue tracking had come to adCenter.
That’s right, had come, because then it disappeared. When we returned to adCenter to pull the new script for a client’s last pre-holiday site update, the new script was gone. No updated script. No help articles. No blog posts. No trace.
Nevertheless, there’s still hope. MSN confirmed we had seen what we had seen. And then they explained why we can’t see it anymore: “@seanroach that was an unintended result of a recent upgrade and was pushed live before it completed development testing.”
So when will development testing be completed? That much we can’t tell you. But this much we can tell you: sooner than later, revenue tracking is finally coming to MSN adCenter.
Tags: msn adcenter, paid search, ppc, Web Analytics
