adwords

Microsoft AdCenter Setup for Mac Users

Microsoft adCenter is Microsoft's answer to Google's AdWords. It's the main search engine business for Microsoft.

Imagine you are a simple businessman, who has his own website and you want to bring more traffic on your site. As you are familiar with Microsoft software for decades now, naturally you'll want to check out their online advertising system.

Here are some basic guidelines to make the experience less painful:

First pitfall - Don't even consider using Safari or any other browser except IE and Mozilla, adCenter website does not support other browsers. Their help center states that also Mac and Virtual machines are not supported.

Before he found out that all Mac browsers are banned, Alec, our creative director, spent several hours trying to get Microsoft adCenter to work with all of the browsers under Mac OS, including spoofing the user-agent. Futile, he assures me. You can't even view the System requirements page!

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Losing Mail with Google Apps

One of my clients recently moved to Google Apps as their full time email solution.

I had my reservations at the time, but more on privacy grounds than technology ones. It turns out there are technology issues as well. My client was very excited about improved spam filtering from Postini. After the move he told me right away that he was getting a lot less spam.

This same client runs an insurance business with online application forms. Those forms go to special unfiltered email boxes. Of course those addresses aren't released publicly.

So they get all their forms and don't have to worry about miscreant insurance filters (most of my other clients are in real estate and we have filtering issues in real estate and mortgages as well).

Over the holidays, we couldn't figure out why Adwords was sometimes claiming more completed applications than the client was receiving. My tests were working. Finally we compared lists.

My client wasn't getting all the completed applications that were going into the database.

It turns out that Google Apps/Mail were deleting quotations (even though they were coming from his own domain).

What's the solution?

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