A system user’s bug is often a programmer’s feature, and this month we thought it would be fun to talk about functions that are just dumb. I was inspired to write this because of a conversation I had with a person at Microsoft AdCenter support regarding budget changes. Here is the situation.
We had an account that was running higher than the client wanted so we think to ourselves no problem just adjust the budget – but life is not that simple. It was late in the month and the account had already spent more in the current month than they wanted to spend next month. This is actually a very common situation but guess what in AdCenter you cannot do that because of a feature/bug. Here is the error screen:
It was late in the month and we had already spent $2,000 for the month and we wanted the budget reduced to $750 month going forward. System answer is: sorry no can do!
Is this just me or is this the dumbest message ever. If I am adjusting a budget it is for the future not the past, so connecting it to the prior spend is just – well – stupid. This is far from the only dumb thing in the various systems but we do think it should get an award as one of the dumbest.
The work around on this is simple enough in that you simply pause the campaign until the first of the month when the logic starts to apply to the new month. This, of course, requires that you perform this function over multiple days making an error or omission more likely.
Dear Microsoft; we realize that adjusting the budget is not going to un-spend the money already spent but budget settings are for going forwards not backwards.
So this is my nomination as the dumbest system feature in the PPC world. Let’s hear yours.