App with nearly useless output
My personal conclusions after using the app for almost 2 months. I believe the app was a pure gold 15 years ago (or would've been). Right now -- it's almost useless.
Positives:
- the app does what it promises, collecting ad copies and ad schedules for different advertisers for set of keywords in a location.
Negatives (in no particular order):
- the interface is very dated. It works but it does surprise you is the product alive and kicking if nobody attended to that area of the product;
- half of the product was not a part of the appsumo deal, as it turned out. Analytics is present in the interface but is unavailable for us, as it requires additional in-app purchase.
It's not a problem, of course, but an unpleasant surprise.
- I went through the demo screens of the in-app Analytics and the additional data they showed in bar graphs was so irrelevant, I decided not to buy it.
- The most important letdown is the output. "You can have your automobile in any color, as long as it's black"... It is a very ugly PDF. And it's nearly useless.
I'll explain:
- Ugly. Nothing to add here. It's badly formatted, unpaginated, with some default fonts, pixelated. I won't show it to any clients of mine.
- PDF. You can only eye it, all 70 or so pages if the niche you monitor is teeming with advertisers. The interface allows to download csv files BUT only for one dimension at a time. For example, a table with list of advertisers and their visibility. Or a separate table with the list of keywords you set yourself to monitor (!). The tables are not joined in any way, they are separate and hardly useless this way.
- Data. The arguably most important table of all ad variants is not even available for csv download. Of course, because variability in Google responsive ads can be very large and it makes for a very ugly spreadsheet. It's not available anyways. So the only way you can evaluate the ad copies is by paging through the pdf report file. Am I supposed to take notes? Or manually copy and paste the text strings from the pdf into a spreadsheet? I don't know.
- Usability. The tool would be OK 15 years ago because Google ads had only 1-2, maybe 3 variants and visual analysis would suffice. Now, a single responsive ad might have a few hundred variations. Multiply it by the number of advertisers and you get the picture.
How can this be processed at all? I guess that in 2023 the answer is AI.
So, this is what I would do with the product:
I'd send these useless illegible, eye-sore PDFs to AI to parse and learn all text strings (headlines and descriptions) in all existing ads, evaluate the best, the worst, then come up with new variants of its own.
It can create profiles for all advertisers, correlate the ads with the landing pages and come up with the list of pros and cons, and make suggestions for your landing pages.
I can continue but I think you get the idea.
Justin_PPCReveal
May 9, 2024I appreciate the thorough review.
The UI needs LOTS of love - this was an MVP to see if there was a demand for the too itself, which we're seeing now.
As for the PDF, agreed that we need to provide some design options and I can't believe we overlooked pagination. To be honest, we thought of the PDF as more of a "Shock and Awe" tool used when showcasing how much is going on in any given niche. The tool is much more usable for advertisers using to improve ads or get new ideas while in the app itself. I do a considerable number of YouTube videos showcasing that approach.
I also agree that the biggest miss was no CSV for the ads themselves. This was requested by a lot of folks and is about to be shipped.
I do VERY much disagree that the app is useless and that's not being totally fair. We have thousands of people using the tool with hundreds of thousands of searches running daily. While it didn't meet your needs, that's a pretty sweeping generalization. We are always looking to improve and most of what you've articulated is already prioritized and being worked through.
Thanks for taking the time to share.