SEMphonic CampaignTracker More Information Overall Rating: Not Rated Pay Per Click Universe Recommends: AdWatcher - 100% Click Fraud Protection. Concerned about click fraud? Protect your online advertising dollars with the world's most trusted & accurate click fraud solution on the market today. AdWatcher will put a stop to competitors and fraudsters who are looking to drain your hard earned advertising budget. Test-Drive AdWatcher For FREE For 30 Days! SEMphonic is located in Novato, California and has been operational since 1997. Its product, SEMphonic CampaignTracker™, is an ad campaign tracker. The software “solves the mind numbing tasks of developing multiple integrated search engine and online marketing reports and competitor monitoring for agencies and enterprises” according to the company. CampaignTracker offers the expected features of tracking your PPC campaigns by search engine, ad groups, position and creative performance, landing page performance, and various aspects of keyword performance. Beyond this, CampaignTracker also identifies your competitors and tracks certain aspects of their campaigns, such as the organic and paid keywords they use and ad copy for search terms. Reports are output in an Excel format and include a variety of visual displays and report listings. SEMphonic CampaignTracker™ is designed for PPC users who are spending more than $500 per month on their campaigns and who have a “fairly sophisticated SEO campaign.” It is available as a single license for $499 and at increasing prices for multiple licenses. You can also purchase keyword libraries for certain industries for either $599 per list or add to CampaignTracker to save $200 on this price. The industries covered are mortgage, travel/airline, travel/car rental, healthcare, real estate, and automobile. Other industries may be available upon request. There is a 15-day free trial available. Flash demos on the site provide a nice introduction to the main components, which should enable you to decide if it is worth your time to take advantage of the free trial. Although the software has been available for some time, its use was limited to Google and Yahoo! until late October 2006 when coverage of MSN, Ask, and AOL was added, greatly increasing its applicability to users who run extensive PPC campaigns across multiple search engines. CampaignTracker will also track banner ads and affiliate networks. SEMphonic also has web analytics and SEM analytics resources and solutions available on their website as consulting arrangements; fairly large campaign dollars would be necessary to justify these expenses. But if you are in that ballpark, the theories behind SEMphonic’s take on web analysis are interesting and offer a slightly different take on things as compared to most other offerings. If you run multiple ad campaigns and invest a fair amount of money in them, CampaignTracker is extensive enough, with the added feature of tracking competitor ad campaigns as well, to warrant a look-see. A nice resource center on their website will provide you with the theories underpinning their approach to the web analytics issues as well as keyword tracking, so you can investigate the applicability of their offerings to the way you choose to evaluate your campaigns. In sum, a nice tool, although perhaps a little pricey for most small businesses. Kudos to SEMphonic for being up front enough to let you know that unless you spend more than $500 per month on PPC, the tool may not be your best choice. |
