No wonder Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, they can’t even handle a simple sign-up.  I used a $50 in free advertising coupon to give them a try.  They accepted the coupon code, then never credited the account my $50.  I should have been suspicious at the repeated message of “charged a one-time, nonrefundable sign-up fee of $5.00, but that’s par for the course with Yahoo and Google.  My credit card was approved, keywords selected, and ad created.  For a test I used the exact same domain URL, ad copy, and keywords as I do in AdWords.

My ad ran a few impressions and then stopped suddenly.  I deleted my ad, retyped it using a longer URL and resubmitted it exactly as they gave in their examples.  The status of my keywords went from inactive to active and I figured “problem solved”.  Then this morning I get a letter from Microsoft adCenter saying all my keywords were suspended because “Display or Destination URL format error”.  Only problem is my URL is correct.  I should know, I type it every day.  If you click on the ad, it goes right to my website, where the exact same URL is displayed.

Typing out a nasty response, I see the following at the bottom of the adCenter email:

Please do not reply to this e-mail message. It was sent from an automated account that is not monitored for responses.”

Now compare that to Google that has live help on their AdWords site. Funny thing about Google is I never used their help, because everything worked.  Account Cancelled.  Looking for how to finalize the cancellation , I found their support link on the bottom of their site in fine print.  How nice, another excuse to sit on the phone with Microsoft, I wonder which country would handle that tech support?