The Headlight Google Adwords integration is closely related to the Adwords API from Google. Google change their API once in a while, and that’s fine with us - usually it gives us more features which is good. The down side is, off course, that more features can make things more cluttered.
So we’ve been in the lab to see if we could make things more simple, and we could! We’ve changed a lot, but I think the most apparent changes are:
- Creating Google Adwords campaigns is much faster.
- Headlight remembers the text ads you’ve used previously, and lets you use them again in a snap.
- Creating new adgroups, ads, editing keywords, cost, campaigns details etc. is now done from the same page.
- You don’t have to sit and wait for a campaign to be approved - it’s uploaded asynchronous.
And now in human please
While most of the new stuff is pretty self explanatory, the asynchronous might need some explanation:
The most annoying thing in any software is waiting time. Example: Why should you wait for a marketing activity to be processed by Headlight, before you can continue your work (even though it’s a good excuse for a coffee break)?
We don’t like waiting any more than you do, and because of this you can now create several Google Adsense campaigns without having to wait for each one to be verified/approved by the good folks at Google, before you can continue (Sorry about messing up your excuse for a coffee break).
Once the Google Adsense campaign is approved and ready you will be notified by Headlight:
So what’s the next step?
To integrate this on the AdServing flow.
More on this… shortly!
Little Helper, the interactive help system for Headlight is now live and almost finished. It is build much like a Wiki so Headlight users can contribute and ask questions. I like to call it a good mix of a blog and an article base, because it works like a blog but without the chronology. The whole thing will be available for free download sometime in the near future.
The vision
We envisioned a community driven help system where people actively participated to create a better and more complete knowledge base. The application had to use best practices from Web 2.0 and .NET.
The technique
Little Helper is build entirely in C# and ASP.NET 2.0 after the principle of KISS. Everything is kept in a single Visual Studio website with no included class libraries, so it’s very easy to approach, extend and maintain. All the posts and comments are kept in XML files, so no database is needed. To summarize: it is plug n’ play.
Feature list
ASP.NET
- URL rewriting
- HTTP compression (HttpModule)
- Whitespace removal (HttpModule)
- ASP.NET 2.0 native themes support
- Intelligent caching
- Breadcrumb
- Onsite search engine
- Unlimited number of posts
- Unlimited number of post sublevels (see the menu)
- Multi language support
Web 2.0
- Microsummary support
- OpenSearch support
- Micro formats (hCard) support
- RSS anywhere (search, comments and site)
- Cross-browser support
Standards
- WAI triple A (the highest accessibility standard)
- Valid XHTML 1.0 transitional
- Valid CSS
- PICS label
- P3P policy
Near future features
Social bookmarking support (Digg, del.icio.us etc.)- DoneAccesskey attribute for the menu- Done- Web service endpoints
- Trackback and pingback support
- Ping Technorati, PubSub etc.
- Post organizer (drag n’ drop AJAX stuff)
- Implement site configuration page
- Google Sitemap
Multi user support- Done- Custom plug-in support
Stuff to improve
Better search algorithm- DoneUse ASP.NET 2.0 membership provider- DoneUse ASP.NET 2.0 profiles for user storage- DismissedMove all strings to resource files- Done- More microformats
It’s quite a big feature list, but as you can see, we still have things to do before we are completely done with the first version.
If you work in an agency, you’ll know what we mean. Everyday tasks such as creating campaigns and forwarding marketing material to media partners aren’t the greatest fun you’ve ever had. Knowing that, we’ve designed Headlight™ to make things much easier.
We’re still working on fine tuning the whole process even further … more to come - soon.
It’s been a while (three weeks!!!) since the last post about new Headlight features. To make it up to you here’s one about something you can’t even see; our brand new API.
So what’s this about, you might ask?
Most of the things you can do in Headlight is actually API oriented - creating banners, making campaigns on Google and so on. Now we just decided to provide our own so you can enrich the data in Headlight or simply export them to other systems like your CRM system or anything similar.
It’s probably not the first thing you’ll start using, when you fire up Headlight for the first time, but I promise you in a year or so, you’ll start wondering how you managed without it!
Our focus in TraceWorks is to develop solid and easy to use marketing software. Our target segment is large and big enterprises as well as marketing agencies. This last group is very important to our business model. An essential feature requested by most of the agencies we work with (especially media agencies) is so-called “3rd Party Adserving” - which is included in our first version of Headlight.
What is 3rd Party Adserving?
It means that banner campaigns are actually centrally hosted on our servers at Traceworks.com. Everytime a banner is displayed on a media you advertise on the banner will actually be hosted and delivered from our server.
The benefits
Imagine that you in real-time can change e.g. 200 banners (marketing message) on 25 different media placements in just a few seconds. This would normally take days. Adserving is all about flexibility - and we know this flexibility can dramatically increase marketing efficiency. It simply saves time and money.
In today’s fragmented media landscape it is much too expensive to have your campaigns running at the wrong websites; you need to target the right audience, elsehow you are just wasting money.
With Adserving you also receive important information on the performance of the creative assets used in your campaigns. This means than you can analyze exactly which messages that motivates people to click on your ads and if they subsequently converts on your website.
Some more advanced (yet easy to use) features:
- Performance reports broken down by media, creatives and campaign pages.
- Automatic generation and emailing of tags and tracking codes to relevant parties.
- Easy handling of Flash formats.
- Support for CPA, Flat Rate, CPC, CPM pricing models for campaigns - or a combination.
Sign-up for the beta-release of Headlight here.
Headlight is a web-based tool that let’s you easily plan, manage, execute, and measure the effectiveness of marketing activities – online as well as offline.
One of the important features that many of our customers ask for is to be able to quickly execute, measure and optimize PPC campaigns such as Google Adwords. Now that the Google Adwords API is finally stabile we’ve of course included this to our first launch of Headlight!
Very quickly explained it means that it’s possible directly from within Headlight (through an API integration with Google) to create, place, and execute campaigns on Google - super simple and quick. All the tracking URLs necessary to e.g. measure con%/ROI% is added automatically.
More advanced features include bulk upload of keywords and the capability to quickly import all your existing campaigns.
All you need to get started is to relate your Google Adwords account to an active My Client Center (MCC) account and to obtain a Google Adwords Token. You can either create your own MCC or simply relate your Googe Adwords account to TraceWorks’ MCC. When this is done you just type in the #API Token, Username, Password into Headlight and the rest is done 100% automatically.
Sign-up for the beta-release of Headlight here.
Managing marketing assets is still a problem for many teams. Files that cannot be found, out-of-date images being used and way too much time and money spent on exchanging and distributing material. And these are just some of the most common problems.
Headlight includes simple Digital Asset Management (DAM). This feature makes it easy to organize, share, and distribute your marketing material to other members of your team or to external partners. Simply upload the files, fire up your web-browser and they’ll follow you always.
Besides these benefits the DAM feature also allows you to quickly create campaigns using the centrally stored assets. All performance numbers (impressions, CTR%, CON% etc.) are then linked automatically to each asset why it’s easy to gain an overview of the most valuable marketing assets.
Marketing assets in the first version of Headlight can be a media (Yahoo, Google, Wall Street Journal etc.), a creative (flash banners, .gif banners), a campaign page (the destination page of a campaign), or a list of keywords (which you use when creating campaigns on Google, Yahoo, MIVA, MSN etc.).
Sign-up for the beta-release of Headlight here.
Most companies are very different from each other and most have different overall marketing objectives. This is simply how the world is and also how Headlight has been designed: with flexibility (e.g. customization) as one of our overall product paradigms – both regarding the user interface (UI) and with the backend architecture.
One example of customization and flexibility is our central Performance Dashboard. It is very straight forward to define/create/add/remove the most relevant information to your specific business.
Sample elements you can create could be custom Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and/or custom Performance Goals. These are defined and added to the Performance Dashboard in just seconds:
Sign-up for the beta-release of Headlight here.
The idea behind the WhyChart is to combine events with visual data charts in order to try and explain cause and effect relationships. We’re simply tired of just displaying data without at least trying to explain: “WHY WHY WHY???”.
In the first version release of Headlight we’ve decided to keep it pretty simple: The events we track and “flag” on the WhyChart are when campaigns start, change, and/or end.
In future versions we expect to extend the definition of “events” to include other types of information e.g. external data such as “weather information”, “stock prices”, “national holidays”, and “special news events”.
We in TraceWorks all think this is a simple and awesome feature and we often fight over who actually came up with the basic idea! I just love when that happens.
Sign-up for the beta-release of Headlight here.
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