Tell Us What You Think about adCenter API; You Could Win an Xbox 360 with Kinect Prize Pack

Greetings, adCenter API community!

I am a Program Manager on Microsoft Advertising's Customer & Partner Experience (CPE) team. One of the most important aspects of my job is to listen to and better understand you, our adCenter API users. To prove that we want to hear your feedback, we?re offering up a prize for taking the time to share it with us. It's easy: simply fill out our survey ? it takes only about 10 minutes to complete ? and you will be entered into our sweepstakes. One lucky entrant will win an Xbox 360 with Kinect prize pack, and 10 other participants will win a copy of a Microsoft software title of each winner's choosing.

The results of this survey will be shared with Microsoft Advertising leadership, and will be used to help shape the future of the adCenter API. This is a great opportunity for your voice to be heard, so please take a few minutes to let us know how we're doing. Do you know any other developers who use the adCenter API? Please let them know about this survey; they can also become eligible for the prizes.

Disclaimer: The survey and corresponding sweepstakes end at 11:59 p.m. PDT on Saturday, April 30, 2011. No purchase is necessary to participate or win. For official rules, click here . This survey is hosted for Microsoft by DatStat, Inc.

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 12, 2011
  At Dealer.com, we have had api access with the Resellers Role, for approximately 18 months.  We have had a growing business with Microsoft AdCenter and are managing approximately 1000 customers.  We drive constant adgroup creation and updates for all our customer car dealers as we respond to inventory and manufacturer's incentives.    This is a lot of api traffic.Here are my recommendations.1) Most api calls involve lists of campaign objects.   api calls always rollback everything on fail.  This is a good design, but can give rise to some inconveniences when dealing with lists of objects. If one object fails,  I have to analyze the fails, but then I have to redrive the good objects back into the api.   It would be convenient to have had the 1st call proceed successfully on the objects that had no issue.2) Latency between operations involving parent and child objects.  I recognize that MSN has a large server complex needs time to propagate changes.  However, this latency is a throughput inhibitor. Currently, the time delays need to be large  for consistent reliability.  A server affinity solution to keep an api user on the same MSN server would be a technical solution.    Right now MSN issues a tracking id in the soap response header.  An API user could use that prior response header in the next API call.  When the MSN infrastructure sees that, it could direct that request to the same MSN server that processed the first request.  That particular server has no need to wait for propagation.3) bulk downloads .. It would seem from some of the public documentation that something here is in the works.  Bravo.4) bulk uploads.   This would be very beneficial during account launches.5) api array calls that aren't array calls. There are several api calls where an array needs to be specified, but the allowable length of the array is one element.6) editorial review process.  It would seem that the MSN servers should be able to detect when an adgroup is in need of editorial review, without a separate api call.7) budget feedback:   The CampaignInfos object should show percent of time a campaign on a daily budget is in BudgetPaused, similar to the adcenter.microsoft.com site.  This is an important metric especially for campaigns running in MonthlyBudgetDivideDailyAcrossMonth mode, where the MSN servers are computing an effective daily budget.8) api availability.thanksChuck Megivernchuck.megivern@dealer.com802-540-1230
• Anonymous
  April 12, 2011
  Hi Chuck,Thank you so much for taking the time to share this feedback and also for taking the time to fill out our survey; we really appreciate it. We are definitely interested in hearing more about your experience which includes the issues you have detailed above. Since you are a Yahoo!-managed customer, I will attempt to reach out to you via your Yahoo! Technical Account Manager. In the meantime, I'd love to see you submit some of these feature requests (recommendations 1, 4, 6, 7) to our UserVoice forum:microsoftadvertising.uservoice.comTo read more about how Microsoft Advertising uses this forum to communicate customer priorities to leadership, check out Tina's blog post:community.microsoftadvertising.com/.../feature-requests-and-feedback-the-customer-and-partner-experience-group-wants-to-hear-from-you.aspxThanks again for your time, and good luck in the Sweepstakes! :)