WordStream has released a revamp of its AdWords Performance Grader, the instant AdWords account auditing tool, now dubbed AdWords Grader Plus. WordStream says the free tool, launched in August 2011, has already been used to analyze accounts representing three billion dollars in total advertising spend. The company has refined the tool based on that wealth of past audit history to give advertisers performance benchmarks within their own industries.
The three main new features in AdWords Grader Plus include a new performance tracker, mobile readiness review and improved benchmarks.
The performance tracker automatically re-analyzes advertisers’ accounts every 30 days. The report tracks performance changes over time, including Quality Score, which Google does not provide automatically. Advertisers can opt-out of this service or choose to run updates more frequently.
The new Mobile PPC Readiness Score assesses an advertiser’s mobile optimization efforts, including whether the account has mobile preferred ads, mobile sitelinks and mobile call extensions set up.
Larry Kim, WordStream’s founder and Chief Technology Officer says the tool’s industry benchmark data has also been refined — incorporating the data the tool has gleaned from the thousands of accounts it has already analyzed — to give advertisers a better sense of how their accounts stack up to others in their industries. The benchmarked KPIs include Quality Score, click-through rate, account activity and wasted spend.
“Now that we’ve graded over $3 billion in total AdWords spend, we have even more insight into the metrics and characteristics that define a healthy PPC account,” said Kim in a statement. “Our new benchmarks reflect that wealth of data, and the new features address the need for businesses to allocate spend to the growing mobile channel as well as to monitor their account performance over time.”
The AdWords Grader tool is certainly a brilliant customer acquisition tool for WordStream — once an advertiser sees how much work needs to be done on an account, he or she just might be inclined to sign up for WordStream’s paid search management software. Kim, though, says that the company has invested a million dollars into the tool, and that it’s used by a broad spectrum of advertisers as well as agencies. “We see agencies using it for clients because it gives them an immediate starting point of where to focus their efforts,” said Kim by phone.
The reporting tool continues to provide analysis in these areas:
- Wasted spend and the use of negative keywords to control spend
- Quality Score for text ads and the keywords targeted
- Click-through rates on ads
- Impression share for ads
- Long-tail keyword optimization
- Text ad optimization
- Landing page optimization
- PPC best practices synopsis
To run a report, an advertiser provides contact information and Google AdWords login credentials through OAuth secure authorization — WordStream does not share or save the login information. The report is generated near instantly.
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