Bug in Microsoft adCenter geo-targeting
Original Post, October 28, 3:27 PST
Double check your geographic targeting in Microsoft adCenter! We have encountered and reproduced a bug with a support representative in which selecting specific US states for inclusion/exclusion does not get saved. More specifically, we have a US campaign that we switched from national targeting to do so by state so that we can exclude 8 specific states. We “uncheck” those 8 states and click submit and save, but when we go back in to check, only 3 of the states are excluded.
As noted, we have informed technical support of this issue, and they replicated it exactly during our call. We will update this post when we are satisfied that it has been resolved.
Update, October 28, 5:00 PST
Microsoft adCenter’s technical team responded indirectly through support that the behavior we are experiencing is correct in that drilling down further into those states will show most of its constituent regions are turned off, but that they do not exclude those which overlap state boundaries. For example, if Nevada is excluded, the city of Las Vegas metro area is not excluded because it crosses into Arizona. All other regions of the state are turned off, but the state’s status appear is shown as enabled because one or more constituent regions is turned on. We pointed out to support several problems with this, such as the fact that it looks and behaves as though the state is not excluded, and that this definition of exclusion is inconsistent with every other similar program that we are aware of. We are still calling this a bug until exclusion of a state really means exclusion of that state.
Update, November 10, 3:00 PST
The problem has been fixed. Read more.
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November 10th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
[…] a prior post we described a problem in Microsoft adCenter’s geo-targeting feature. Today we learned that the bug has been fixed, and we were able to verify it through the interface […]