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.

Today we have a very special announcement to make: Nordic Venture Partners (NVP), a leading European venture capital firm, has made a private equity investment in TraceWorks.

Here’s some background on the decision.

Over the past 3 and a half years we’ve accomplished a lot on our own:

• We have released 2 products (StatLynx and Headlight).
• We have assembled the best possible sales and tech talents available in Denmark (or anywhere).
• We have more than 500 clients and agencies world wide and our topline is growing with more than 125% annually.

Since we launched our new end-to-end marketing platform Headlight(TM) about 6 months ago we’ve been contacted by nearly 10 different VC firms.

NVP and Managing Partner, Henrik Albertsen, was by far the best fit. They represent just the right mix of local presence, international network, wisdom and wild ambitions … and the means to walk the walk.

Aboard is also Morten Lund and the rest of LundKenner. Morten has been been amazingly helpful during the last 6-8 months. First, of course, by introducing us to NVP. Secondly by introducing us to his two partners Søren Kenner and Mark Sonne Kharazmi - both proven business professionals perfectly representing that significant “LundKennerism”.

This investment and these people will enable us to do 3 things:

• Accelerate our R/D capabilities to go from request/idea to prototype to market faster.
• Better support our international partners and clients locally.
• Reach international markets quicker.

We hope this boost of ambition and NVP’s personal vote of confidence will help us achieve our big plans.

So here we go. Thank you all!

Cheers, Anders Lau Nielsen & Morten E. Wulff

__________________________________

PR stuff:

Press Release (.pdf):
“TraceWorks makes marketing management a science.pdf”

Press Picture (.jpg) (Wulff, right & Nielsen, left):
“Picture of Anders & Morten.jpg”

TraceWorks Logo (.gif):
“from_traceworks_with_love.gif“

Let’s keep it brief.

Our team has been working around the clock in order to get everything up-and-running again; especially our DBA-genius, Michael Nathe, has once again shown us why he’s forever an All-Star TraceWorker - who’ll be immortalized in our hall of fame.

STATUS:
Finally we’re 99% done: Data from the last few days are being inserted right this moment - but Headlight is 100% functional and all data will be available in the reporting interface shortly.

NEED HELP?!
We’ll gladly assist you in any way with the things you need done – like setting up campaigns, checking data, etc. Hopefully we help make up for any delays this may have caused in your daily routines. Should you have any comments or questions then please feel free to contact our VP of Customer Relations, Pelle S. Jakobsen: psj(AT)traceworks.com / +45 33 118 118.

Just a quick update: Headlight is still not back to life.

I won’t go into details, but what happened was that an upgrade of our hardware went wrong.

Our tech guys have been working like mad to get Headlight up and running and we hope to be able to go back online soon.

We will keep you posted.

Due to an unforeseen delay in our scheduled hardware upgrade and in the implementation of our new reporting environment we expect Headlight to be offline between 9 am - 3 pm (GMT+1), today, March 26^th 2007.

This will in no way have effect on data collection, active campaigns (ad serving / non-ad serving) and so on.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may occur – but we’re working in warp-speed with ninja-precision in order to get the job done ASAP.

As soon as Headlight is online again we will gladly assist you in any way with the things you need done – like setting up campaigns checking data, etc. Hopefully we can compensate in this way and make up for any delays this may have caused in your daily routines.

Best Regards, Fearless Support

Pelle S. Jakobsen - VP, Customer Relations

We are preparing a major upgrade of our reporting servers: Too many customers and too much data and not enough crunching power. The server upgrade will happen at some point this weekend: Expect 2-3 hours down time.

NOTE! This will have no effect on any of your active campaigns e.g. ad serving or data collection.

Should you have any comments or questions then please feel free to contact our VP of Customer Relations, Pelle S. Jakobsen: psj(AT)traceworks.com.

It’s now possible to create a custom KPI and/or Goal Chart from more or less any metric available with Headlight.

In the bottom right corner of Headlight you’ll find a link “Latest updates”; It an RSS feed which will provide you with latest updates on features, scheduled maintenance, tutorials, best practices etc.