VisualCalc AdWords Dashboard 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! The VisualCalc AdWords Dashboard provides a slightly different approach to analyzing the performance of your Google AdWords campaigns than most other products. Constructed using the Google AdWords API, VisualCalc’s goal is to move you from “data to decisions.” It is an easy-to-use, straightforward application. For those overwhelmed by the complexity of getting anything more than simple statistics out of Google Analytics, VisualCalc is a solution to consider. You may ask why on earth someone would pay for an application such as VisualCalc when Google Analytics is free to AdWords account holders? The most obvious is the ease of use of the program. For many non-technical types, it is easier to understand complex statistics when they are presented in a visual manner, instead of cringing when faced with a spreadsheet full of data points. However, this is not to say that VisualCalc is a lightweight application with no value to anyone other than non-math types. VisualCalc’s power is not just in its reliance on visuals – different types of representations of the same data can be more meaningful to some individuals – but in its ability to compare multiple characteristics against each other. Visuals are provided in the form of line, pie, and bar charts, but also via gauges and heat maps. A heat map, for example, can show your most effective keywords as green and those which are losing money as red, with the size of each box on the heat map determined by the cost of each keyword. In this way, you can quickly determine if your worst-performing keyword is also your most expensive one – a clear case for some adjustment needed. VisualCalc is useful in presenting such multi-dimensional data. For example, instead of just being able to see number of clicks over a week, you can choose to see the number of clicks and the number of impressions over each of your ad groups, for example. You can track campaigns, keywords, ad groups, clicks, conversions, click-through rates, revenue, average CPC, keywords, ROI, ad position, etc., and drill down into the data to discover how any specific keyword is performing in any of the parameters. The detailed stats are just a mouse-over away of each data point on a chart, but the main focus of VisualCalc is on representing complex data points in a simple, easy-to-figure-out fashion for the non-statistically-minded among us. An on-site tour of the AdWords Dashboard walks you through the main features and shows you how you can move from the top-level info down into specifics to discover why a specific campaign may not be doing as well as another. The tutorial is clear and well-organized and includes a section on how to set up customized dashboards. An online “test drive” allows you to play around with preloaded AdWords account data to try out over 50 different graphic illustrations and see more closely how the software works. Although you do have to provide your email address to access the tour and test drive, the email you receive promises a free trial as well. If you decide that it’s worth trying to ease some of the frustrations you may feel from working with Google Analytics, give the free trial a shot. Unfortunately, VisualCalc doesn’t provide pricing directly on their website. As a Google AdWords API product, the developers would have had to pay Google for developing their application, so a charge to use the product is not unanticipated, but it would be nice to have a rough idea of cost before investing time and effort into trying it out. VisualCalc has a number of other products for financial management, mostly mortgage and insurance calculators and retirement planning tools. Quite a few financial institutions use their products. Their Cost of Raising Children Calculator has bad news for someone like my brother – he’s going to have to come up with $257,730 more to finish raising his 5 and 7 year old children to 18! As a niche product for AdWords advertisers who are scared off by the seeming complexity of Google Analytics, VisualCalc may be a way to ease into statistical analysis without feeling you need a business or stat degree to do so. A nice addition would be the ability to chart data by geographic location and time of day (which Google Analytics offers). |
