If you’re one of millions who are watching their PPC rather closely, and you want to have full control over things, you really need to watch out for messages from the PPC companies about scheduled maintenance.Â

Here’s one I got today:

Dear Will,

On April 26, 2007, we’re upgrading Microsoft adCenter with the improved navigation, reporting, and campaign management features from our beta site. During this upgrade, you’ll be unable to access adCenter for a short time starting at 5:00 P.M. Pacific Time.

Additional feature upgrades will also occur on April 28, 2007. During this upgrade, adCenter will be unavailable for up to 24 hours starting at 12:00 P.M. Pacific Time. Your ads will continue to run as scheduled during both adCenter upgrades.

With these upgrades, you’ll experience new features that will allow you to:

- Search within your campaigns. Use full text search to easily find ads, keywords, ad groups, campaigns, and accounts. Please note that orders are now called ad groups.
- Save important items in Favorites. Tag your campaign items for follow-up using Favorites.
- Quickly navigate your accounts. Use the improved navigation to quickly navigate to any campaign or ad group in your account.
- Easily access help content. Hover over the green question mark icons for pop-up help tips.(1)
- Manage keywords faster. Bulk edit keyword settings and delete low-performing keywords.
- Save time importing campaigns. Directly import your campaigns from other search advertising programs.
- One click downloads. Download your datasets into Excel with one click.
- And more! View our blog:

If you have any questions, please contact our adCenter support team: http://msmedia.microsoft.com/Key=xxxx

Sincerely,

The Microsoft adCenter Team

Your ads will continue to show just fine, so what’s the problem?

Well, not all of you have lots to spend. Or perhaps you manually run campaigns during certain hours and manually turn them off as well.

During these ‘blackout’ periods, you have no control over your PPC account. The ads continue to run, and you can’t turn them off. You can’t pause them, you can’t disable them. You can’t change keywords or pricing bids.

While this won’t affect most of us who run our PPC campaigns on autopilot, those of you who do not should be aware of these things. Make sure all of your PPC account profiles have valid email addresses so you know when these things are going to happen.