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.

A quick update for all persons using adserving: You can now use any version of flash - including flash version 9.

The syntax for flash banners should be exactly the same as before.

As a part of our “Smarter adserving” effort we’ve held work shops with our partner, AdTech, to get the ball rolling faster.

The outcome of this will be new features that we will launch during the next few months.

The first feature has already been launched secretly this week and was perhaps the most wanted request in Headlight: Faster updates on adserving.

From now on you will get updates on the number of impressions every four hours. This will usually mean that as soon as you log into Headlight on day with new campaign activities you will be able to tell instantly if they are displayed or not.

We are proud to present to you two new features for adserving:

A lot of people have asked us for jpg-support; it’s now here!

Also testing has become better: We have changed the logic a bit so you will be able to start testing your banner campaigns immediately regardless of the start date you’ve entered in Headlight. We are convinced this will make your adserving life a lot easier.

We have in conjunction with debugging our export to CSV functionality found an error in Excel.

This can best be illustrated by creating a small test CSV like this:

When opening this in Excel, we get a beautiful representation like this:

All is good, life is lovely. Until you decide to rename the first column from MyID to just ID:

Then Excel gets nasty, and starts yelling at you:

There are two ways to get around this Excel error, either you just don’t call your first column ID, or you save the CSV as UTF-8 instead of ANSI, but then you might have some problems with correct encoding of local characters. Good going Microsoft.

Once in a while people ask why data in the section Google “Search terms” is so distorted. By which they mean that Headlight often can’t track all search terms people use (please note that search terms are not the same as keywords bought).

I noticed during this week that actually using specific add ons for Firefox (and probably also other browsers) you can click on the display URL.

The obvious problem to advertisers is that using the “headline link” gives you the ability to track everything (using whatever marketing tool), but the other one… well a click on that link wouldn’t track anything, since it’s basically a click on something that isn’t a link. Jikes!

Mads has done yet another astonishing video showing how to get your email activities tracked automatically.

It’s great stuff, so check out the wiki video whenever you have the time.

As we are still working on the wiki, please send us comments if you disagree with the way it’s done or would like videos on other topics.

Just as I promised in my last post: We have a new feature for you. Actually it’s not just a new feature - also we’ve improved usability.

Once people started using our adserving solution we got tons of suggestions from customers and partners. Because of that we’ve done some changes to the flow.

To be completely fair it wasn’t that hard to improve usability - we just removed a few steps and made it faster. A lot faster.

Try it - you’ll love it.

Also we added the possibility of having more than one clickTAG in one ad. This means that you’ll be able to segment your ads better. Instead of leading all visitors to the same campaign landing page you can now have them go directly into a sub category.

This real life example shows you a banner with two clickTAGs. Clicking on the first will take you to our product page and the second will lead you to our job section.

In case you need help changing your existing campaigns or your banners, just contact us and we’ll assist you. Happy adserving.

It’s been a while since the last post about new features. This does not mean that all TraceWorkers packed their speedos and went swimming. We’ve been doing a lot of new stuff that I’ll be posting about over the next couple of weeks.

One of the fanciest things we’ve come up with is a synchronization tool for your Google campaign activities. It allows you to work with your Google campaigns the way you prefer: You can use Headlight, the AdWords web interface or the AdWords Editor.

No matter what you choose, we’ll keep everything in sync. Simply tell us how often you want us to synchronize and we’ll set it up for you - easy, seamless and painless…

If you have been using Headlight for a while, you may already have familiarized yourself with the concept of the WhyChart.
This most illustrious chart shows you the progress of your activities in relation to any changes you might have made to your campaigns.
It was conceptualized to answer the basic question: What effects does my carefully, orchestrated marketeering have on the way activities perform.
Until now a campaign’s conversions have all been summed up in a ‘total conversion’ recap, with no way of seeing the individual campaign’s conversion performance.
Now, however we’ve made it possible for you to view the conversion course of each individual campaign that you run :

Just click ‘Conversions’ in the Marketing Performance tab, and…. a nice little graph will greet you - along with your usual drill-down view.
Without user interaction the graph will only show the total sum-course of your campaigns.
But check off one of your conversions in its checkbox (as if to drill down), and campaign will be added to the graph.
Astounding, I think you must agree.

For the sake of readability we have limited the amount of conversions displayed at any one time to 6.
Any number above that has shown to be plain undicipherable.
Trust us on this.