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

Having spent the last few years refining our release versioning systems and policies, usage model, and data center systems, we feel it is time to officially remove the beta label from the AdWords API.

We'd like to thank those of you who have supported the API over the last several years, and especially to those intrepid souls who first joined the beta in early 2005. Since our initial beta launch, the API has grown to support thousands of independent developers. The AdWords API is an integral part of the AdWords platform, and one we will continue to refine and develop in the years to come.

-- Borana Toska, Product Marketing

Fast food for the brain
Business Intelligence, that’s what I am all about. I like thinking up new ways to empower companies, customers and partnerships to function and perform more efficiently. I guess being brainwashed as a former long term McDonald’s employees has made me dream in terms of business processes and standardization optimization.

Although not being the most attractive place to work in terms of wages it sure has one of the most precise value chains and business models around. Their concept of product standardization to fit equal customer experiences around the globe is a staggering information warehouse, shared with each individual employee when starting a career in the burger industry.

Knowing that it takes exactly 1 ounce of lettuce on a BigMac or that the bottom half of a clamshell grill must be 350 degrees Fahrenheit might seem as superfluous information, but indeed it embodies the “best in class performance” that McDonald’s strive to achieve. Their value chain is fine tuned to deliver just the right quality pr $ fast food your demand dictates.

Online marketing standards
When thinking of what I can do as a new employee around here, I stumbled upon our cool product Headlight™ and started browsing. It certainly seems that value chain management in online marketing is what we live for in TraceWorks. Headlight™ supports just that, enabling you to connect your activities and measure your succes.

Knowing what Banners, e-mail campaigns, Google ads and natural referrers are creating revenue is important but knowing if you are still underperforming is even more important. Specific areas in goal setting, planning, execution and performance measurement can be off setting the whole value chain and result in catastrophic if not just worse performance overall. Headlight™ helps you avoid such disaster by delivering the ability to plan and quantify these essential activities. In a succesful company that reaches their goals and actually has a solid value chain, it is not always easy to asses which part of your organization surrounding online marketing is dragging the others down and in successful online marketing divisions it can be even harder to identify which areas of the value chain that could contribute to an even better performance.

Wondering about competition
I have always been wondering how they did it in Burger King. I was convinced that they must be worse at least in some aspects or that their value chain optimization would not be a valid parameter to benchmark against. I was sure that they pre-grilled their beef patties, served food that was too old or even picked up dropped food from the ground and served it; the holy grail of any McDonald’s. If you want to lose your job, pick something up and put it on a tray.

I was convinced we were the best, but I was at best making a qualified guess. Wondering about all these things is helpful, but does not present you with any motivation to improve your own operation. My point is that even though you have the most effecient overall value chain in your industry, you could still be outperformed by your competition when it comes to specific areas.

What if we could actually know what areas we were, albeit successful, then lagging behind compared to the competition, the regional market or in the general industry. What if online marketing could actually be compared to each other and one could motivate online marketing divisions to improve performance and precisely demonstrate which areas they were market leaders and which they were not. It leaves you with the same wonder that I once had flipping burgers while studying to for my bachelors in business management and information technology.

Help us help you!
What are you wondering about? I am sure that many of you in online marketing divisions around the globe wonder if you are actually the best at creating conversions off banners, if your ROI on PCC marketing is the highest, if you have the highest Click Through Rates or simply if you are most efficient at converting visitors to sales. My question is simple. If you could pick 5 to 10 questions about your industry or competitions online marketing ability, what would they be? What parameters would you like to benchmark yourself against in online marketing?