AlertLab™ is Search Laboratory’s proprietary PPC campaign monitoring and testing software that works with Google AdWords and Bing Ads.
AlertLab provides a more time-efficient and accurate approach to PPC account management, freeing up account managers to focus their expertise on campaign optimization and driving value from our clients’ PPC campaigns.
Peace of mind for PPC campaign management
The day-in-day-out complexities of managing PPC campaigns can result in sleepless nights for busy campaign managers and execs. Traditionally campaign management involves a mix of ad-hoc manual checks, AdWords and Bing Ads scripts, and manual URL checks.
These are reactive, time-consuming ways to manage a campaign, and there is a risk that manual checks get missed, particularly at busy times or when key people are out of the office.
Even with the best campaign managers in the business (which of course we have!), we took the view that there should be a better way, one that uses a more a reliable approach, and one that frees up account managers’ time so they can focus their expertise on optimizing campaigns, rather than running routine tasks.
So we developed AlertLab to further increase the ROI for our clients by both reducing the amount of time spent on routine menial tasks – and therefore increasing the time spent on campaign optimization – and by minimizing the risk inherent in any marketing campaign.
Alerts can be configured using three different criteria: metrics, budget, or URL:
Metric alerts
With AlertLab we can check a wide range of metrics, in a number of ways:
We can then set minimum/maximum thresholds for each test:
Typical metric checks include:
- Have impressions dropped off (i.e. are ads not appearing?)
- Has bounce rate increased? (i.e. is there a problem with the landing page?)
- Are we achieving or exceeding revenue targets?
Budget and forecast checks
Budget checks can be run against a specific budget period and for a specific number of days. They can check historic spend, as well as forecasting future spend for a specified period:
- Highly flexible way to define the budget period
- Uses data to project performance, thus anticipating problems
- Can combine data from multiple AdWords and Bing accounts, as well as filtering on specific campaigns.
URL checks
AlertLab can run regular URL checks to identify broken URLs or pages with errors that will result in wasted expenditure:
- It downloads all URLs for all ads, every day.
- It handles tracking templates/parameters.
- It handles ad extensions such as sitelinks.
Flexible test parameters are able to identify more complex issues e.g. landing page redirects:
AlertLab can also check for specific content on the page, for example, whether a product is out of stock:
Quick and easy A/B testing
AlertLab can also be used to test multiple ad texts/formats, and automatically reports on the results:
For more detailed examples on how to use AlertLab to run PPC tests please read our blog article.
Contact us to find out more about how AlertLab can improve the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns.
Insights
