Working and founding a business intelligence company means that you (a) belong to the analytics-obsessed (b) when obsessively analyzing your own business you begin to eat your own dog-food. This is entirely the case with our AdWords campaigns: we pore over them using our Prism business intelligence software.
In 2008, we released our Amazon S3 dashboards, created using SiSense Prism. Now, we're launching pre-packaged reports and dashboards that show how we analyze our AdWords data using SiSense Prism. This time around, we've taken care to package it in a way that is meaningful and useful.
Google AdWords have packaged reports and are beginning to allow limited drilldown. But no one can argue they were built for in-depth analysis. Many use Excel for this purpose, but it requires too much effort for anything but the basic drilldown. Other tools have pre-packaged algorithms that aim to replace the human. This is why we just launched our dog food with an AdWords label.
Prism for Adwords is a Google AdWords analysis, dashboard and reporting tool, to be used on AdWords raw data. Typically, heavy AdWords users download AdWords raw data and analyze it in other tools, custom or excel. The reason most people use raw AdWords data is that online AdWords reporting and analysis doesn't provide all the comparisons and views that are required to optimize campaigns. One of the main needs is either to calculate custom KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) or to sort and filter keywords across ad groups and campaigns.
The optimization process makes you invest more in the better performing campaigns and words; it also means that you can adjust keywords, ads and campaigns to seasonal and other patterns. This process is iterative and continous. The better you are at digging into the data, testing hypothesis and acting upon them, the more results you'll have. There is no magic algorithm; it's a human-assisted process. This is why our software doesn't try to do the work for you – it just packs all the indicators in front of you, so you can easily make the right decision.
We're in private beta. Drop us a line here if you'd like to join.