What was the best part about using WordStream?
Word Stream is a pay per click advertising analytics platform which aggregates and distills information and analytics from Google Adwords, Facebook Ads and Bing Ads in order to present it in a highly visual, easy to understand format. You can take action on this data to adapt your ad campaigns for better results. This software would save a good amount of time with the analyzing of data doing the work of one or more people full time easily. It would also save money on pay per click analysis expenditure and focus it on taking this work already done for you in order to apply it to your campaigns instead which increases team productivity as well.
Google Adwords can be overwhelming in a lot of regards because there is so much configuration with it's advanced features. So to analyze data this way first requires that you are a pay per click expert, or at least very competent with this advertising medium. And then you must the learn the Adwords account itself in order to launch your campaigns which pre-requisite to using WordStream anyways. After that, instead of costly trial and error in your campaigns, or simply ignoring features that may leave something on the table, you can implement WordStream as your analysis expert. It's not cheap mind you but if you have a well prepared product or service and sales funnel in place it can a huge ROI.
I like WordStream as an SEO tool with it's keyword discovery, research and suggestion tools as well as it's organized keyword grouping and content tools which are integrated. The tools drill deep into markets and this keyword data is very useful for PPC campaigns but well beyond this also. WordStream for SEO goes beyond traditional keyword suggestion tools, offering keyword discovery and research capabilities, and then layers on keyword analytics, keyword grouping and organization, and integrated content authoring tools. WordStream also has a lot of resources available with vibrant community and University so the ability to learn PPC and continually improve at it is facilitated as well and I appreciate that.
What would you change about your experience with WordStream?
I've heard of instances where this software can lag and crash but I've not experienced this yet. Hardware and software are not perfect and as it's not a serious pattern and the company is committed to updates this wouldn't be a huge issue with real time data backups included. I've also learned that some companies would prefer more account customization options in order to tailor it to their complex technical product but I'm confident it would currently suit most types of product and services.
It would be nice if there was as much reporting possible for display ad campaigns as there is for text based adwords. And more automation would be nice as well for rules, as an example. There's going to be a learning curve when implementing various ad platforms and optimizing them for WordStream. Each platform is slightly different and their are quite specific functionality in each which could affect the WordStream integration overall. Though I've read customer support is excellent and that they guide you through anything you need to implement their software quickly into your ad campaigns.
The pricing doesn't make it easily accessible to very small businesses, freelancers or start ups. I understand their pricing reflects the ROI possible but it would be nice to have a very basic lifetime free plan with some useful data, which could function as a lead generation tool for WordStream as well.
Overall Feedback
The time savings possible by using this PCC analysis and tracking tool would be very significant. It would also save money in the fact you can hire junior associates to run this software and not have to utilize the more costly expert analyst PPC role in your company at all as this software does all that work and distills into visual learning. The savings would be roughly equivalent to the difference between the cost of this PPC expert hire at $50,000+ per year versus less than a tenth the cost to use this professional PCC analysis and tracking solution. If you have a competent team, and you're already advertising on Bing, Google or Facebook with cash flow available it would be a very worthwhile investment to integrate WordStream into your advertising campaigns because the ROI is potentially massive.