LYBP

The upgrade is finished! (read my post from Friday for an overview of some of the bigger changes)

Go ahead, login and give it a whirl!

A couple of housekeeping items to help you get the most out of the new system:

• If you want to use sales/lead conversion tracking, you’ll need to click a few more checkboxes on your Adwords Report settings so that we can crunch the numbers. Just login to your Winner Alert account, click “Setup”, then click Instructions next to the account you want to update. Make sure all of the checkboxes shown in the sample are checked. All make sure to update the filters section of your report with the new suggested settings.
• Remember, any changes you make in your Adwords/MSN/Yahoo account will not be reflected in your Winner Alert Tree report until the next day.
• We’ve done a ton of testing prior to releasing this upgrade, but there are always what programmers call “edge cases” that we weren’t able to test. Basically there could be some obscure bug that only raises its ugly head when it meets your data. If you notice any strangeness, please click on the help button in the upper right hand corner and let the helpdesk know about it ASAP. We have extra staff on hand this week to help squash any bugs that are found right away!

Phew! Well, that’s about it!

As always, we love hearing feedback (good or bad!). So please let us know what you think of the changes by posting a comment on this post (you can also click the feedback link in Winner Alert directly).

That’s it for now. I’m going to go get some sleep - it’s been a loooong weekend!

Erik

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After spending a long weekend getting the new servers setup, database servers synced, and updated Winner Alert software installed, we are now in the home stretch!

You can go ahead and login to your new Winner Alert account and begin setting up reports for Yahoo and MSN.   The interface should be familiar.  We know you already have tons of things to keep on top of, so we strove to keep everything as simple as possible in the user-interface.

If you want to use sales/lead conversion tracking, you’ll need to check a few more boxes in your Adwords report.  Login to Winner Alert, click Setup, and then click Instructions for the step-by-step on what to do. (make sure to edit your existing report, don’t create a 2nd one…).

We’ll be finished with the upgrade in the next couple of hours, at which time your tree report will be full of data again…

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Over the past several months, we’ve compiled all of our customers’ Winner Alert feature requests and have been working on a ton of great upgrades for the software.

The changes are so substantial that we’re having to add even more new servers to our cluster to handle all the processing for the new reports.

Here’s a sneak peak at some of the enhancements:

• The ability to test 3 or more ads per adgroup at once! This is probably our number one feature request. We hired a top-notch statistician to help us re-write our testing algorithm to be able to handle “n” ads and identify winners faster!
• Conversion testing module. This is a Winner Alert extension feature that is for advanced users who want to track their split tests based on sales or leads conversions in addition to traditional CTR.
• Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN adCenter tracking.
• Improved email reports (including email notification of adgroups in “Dead Heat” status.
• 200% increase in user-interface speed!
• Downloadable reports.
• Many more behind the scenes updates to help you work less and get more done…

After several months of hard work and almost completely re-writing the system, our developers are finally finished coding the changes! We’ve spent the last 2 weeks testing the system and everything looks ready to go.

The server upgrades will be starting tonight and continuing through the weekend in our data center. These kinds of major updates always make me a little nervous, and I certanly won’t be getting much sleep until Monday night — but I know all our hard work is going to pay off and that you’ll love the results!

The latest version will be up and running when you login Monday morning.

Have a great weekend — I’m looking forward to hearing your feedback on Monday!

~Erik

PS If you have any questions at all - feel free to leave them in the comments section below.

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