I’m the QA Manager at TraceWorks, and I have been asked to inform you about the most important improvements and bug fixes in this morning’s Headlight update. I’ve also promised to continue doing so in the future, so be sure to watch this space

But no more small talk… The update includes more than 40 bug fixes, and the highlights are as follows:

- The backup banners are now displayed in Headlight when a Flash banner campaign is edited or created.
- The “Test banner campaign” functionality has been made more user friendly.
- The image preview functionality has been improved to better handle file names containing special characters, etc.
- Goal Charts and KPI charts no longer display data from dates not included in the selected time period.
- Using the “Compare by label” functionality no longer prevents further drilldowns.
- Advanced banner campaigns can now be deleted without errors.
- In the automated e-mail flow, the recognition of links in HTML e-mails has been vastly improved.
- The selected dates are no longer reset when the period selector is reopened after choosing a custom period.
- The label is now always retained correctly when a previously labelled activity is edited at a later time.

Headlight will be closed down tomorrow 24th of April in the timeframe 8-9 GMT+1.

In this period you will not be able to login to Headlight. Your campaigns will not be affected in any way and all traffic and conversions will get tracked.

In case you have any questions just contact your contact person at TraceWorks.

When waking up every morning and trying to figure out how to fill out these oversized shoes I have been handed by our two visionary owners, Morten Wulff and Anders Lau, as well as my CEO Christian Dam I feel somewhat like trying to mount a starving Rancor while only wearing a pair of bacon Speedos.

Looks were decieving
It is not that I do not like the challenge; I honestly love it. However it is a task that grows as I entrench myself into the corners of the beast we call online marketing. From miles away it seemed like nothing more than a heavily sedated kitten and I must admit I looked forward to picking it up and petting it gently on its back while it purred predictably with a rewarding look in its eyes.

As the early weeks have soon grown into 1½ months, it has become obvious that the kitten has grown somewhat more threatening and ferocious in the looking glass and thus I have had to adopt a different and more systematized strategy to tame it, let alone pet it.

I love boxes
Categorizing the problems has seemed to work though. I have come to the conclusion that not only do categories help me define a solution to the problem of understanding the beast itself; It also gives me a weapon with which I can use in helping the world taming their own pet Rancor.

I am waking up happy these mornings and seem to get closer every day to a definition of online marketing as a measurable process within an organization. I have defined the categories and subcategories to form the frame of my solution and have made a draft survey to identify and measure precisely which information one of the major category holds and how this impacts the total online marketing organization.

The revolution is at hand
Soon enough I will be riding my Rancor down your busy online highway screaming and waving at you in definance with my Business Intelligence hat in my hand, not entirely unlike Major Kong riding the Atomic Bomb in the end scene of “Dr. Strangelove, or how I learned to stop worrying and start to love the bomb”. At least I hope I will and I will happily tell you all how I did it.

I am sure we will meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.

In the past, we've been known for some creative April announcements. Today, however, I'm happy to report a few real reductions in API rates that will bring a smile to your face. You'll be glad to know we aren't joking.

We have made some enhancements to our system that have enabled us to drive greater efficiencies that are now reflected in savings to our API users.

Effective today, we have lowered the number of API units charged for the following services:

Service Name, Former Rate (in API units), New Rate

• addAds: 125 -> 50 per item
• addCriteria: 25 -> 20 per item
• updateCriteria: 10 -> 3 per item
• getKeywordVariations: 25 -> 20
• getKeywordsFromSite: 25 -> 20
• estimateAdGroupList: 25 -> 20 per item
• estimateCampaignList: 25 -> 20 per item
• estimateKeywordList: 25 -> 20 per item
• scheduleReportJob: 1000 -> 500

API units will continue to be charged at a cost of US$0.25 (or local currency equivalent) per thousand units consumed; but these per-service rate reductions will bring substantial savings.

And as always, we encourage developers to use list methods whenever possible (e.g. addCampaignList). They are the most efficient (and cost-effective) way to process large data sets.

- Debbie Leight, Product Marketing

We'll be performing routine system maintenance on Saturday, April 12 from approximately 10:00am to 2:00pm PST. You won't be able to access AdWords or the API during this time frame, but your ads will continue to run as normal.

Cheers,
-Jeffrey Posnick, AdWords API Team