Although Microsoft advertising platform, adCeneter, isn’t really a worthy competitor to Google AdWords in terms of revenue or neither traffic, we can’t take the credit from Microsoft for always trying to improve and upgrade its service for both the users and to also for the advertisers.

Last year in August, the company has updated its policy for better filtering against low quality sites and in November it presented many improvements and upgrades to the platform’s interface. Now, adCenter is conducting the first round of (small) updates for 2012.

Microsoft’s community manager, Tina Kelleher, has introduced in a blog post the new updates in adCenter:

• One More Character In Description- In order to compare the standards with the rest of the advertising industry (and mostly to AdWords), the ad description total allowed characters will rise to 71 from 70. This will allow ad importing from AdWords easier without changing the ad description.
• New Campaign Budget Status- A new gadget has been added to the dashboard, which offers an quick overview on the advertiser budget and contains the tabs- “Today’s depletion”, “Health” and “Action”.
• Mobile Targeting- A new mobile targeting option has been added that looks awfully similar to the mobile targeting function AdWords has presented about two weeks ago… It is now possible to target ads to specific smartphones/tablets operating systems.

Here’s a nice image Microsoft released that covers where are the updates available:

In other related news from adCenter, soon Yahoo Search Marketing users from the U.K. will notice an extra tab that contains a transition tool to adCenter, which will enable (supposedly) an easy transfer of their accounts as part of the Bing-Yahoo paid search alliance integration in Europe.