March 21, 2008

Winner Alert Upgrades Coming!

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.

March 21st 2008 Posted to Winner Alert

Comments

  1. Tim Adams
    March 21st, 2008 | 2:49 pm

    About 3 times a week I say to myself, “I need to email Winner Alert and see if they’ll add in conversion tracking.”

    Guys, all I can say is … SUH-WEET.

    Great job. Thank you so much

  2. Brandy Huffer
    March 21st, 2008 | 5:00 pm

    I am really happy about being able to test more than 2 ads at once. My clients seem to always have a gaggle of ads in each adgroup when they come to me. This will really shave some time off my client intake!

    Question. what do you mean by the part that says Conversion tracking is an “extension feature”?

  3. Timothy
    March 22nd, 2008 | 8:01 am

    Erik,

    Does this tool require AdWords API access in order to work?

    -Timothy

  4. Erik
    March 22nd, 2008 | 9:38 am

    Brandy –
    Because of the potential for conversion tracking to confuse people new to the adwords game, and the substantial server processing that goes into creating the conversion tracking reports, the feature is being made available as a $5/month addon to the Winner Alert Basic service. We are however including it for free with the “Winner Alert Power User” and “Winner Alert Pro” subscription levels.

    Timothy –
    No, Adwords API access is not required. Setup is quick and painless (only takes about 5 minutes to get up and running).

    Please let me know if you have any other questions…. :-)

    ——–
    Technical Note: The upgrade process is going very smoothly. The rest of the new servers should be online by tonight and we’ll start pushing the software upgrade to all the servers tomorrow…

  5. LYBP » Winner Alert Upgrade: Finished!
    March 24th, 2008 | 2:19 pm

    […] upgrade is finished! (read my post from Friday for an overview of some of the bigger […]

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