I got an nice introduction to WordStream Adwords Performance Grader yesterday which really looks great!  Larry Kim, the CTO/Founder of WordStream took me through a tour of his new platform.  Being that I’m a technologist, but not so much a paid search specialist, I focused on what challenges and problems Adwords Performance Grader solves.

• Development Time =   about 3 months
• Reason for Developing this tool = many WordStream clients were asking how their campaigns were doing relative to others that WordStream runs.  Larry Kim decided he gets these kinds of questions so often, it made sense to create an automated platform tool that could answer many of those questions for clients, potential clients or pretty much anyone that has an active AdWords campaign.
• How does Adwords Performance Grader work? – The Performance Grader compares your Adwords campaign with those at a similar spend level and tells you how it is performing relative to others at that level (aggregate numbers and percentages).

Here are some screenshots from DazzlingDonna Blog:  I will say that I think a 5 or 10 minute video produced by WordStream would help here – I searched for one and did not find anything.  The Adwords Performance Grader is an interesting tool in an interesting niche, but it probably hasn’t gotten picked up on yet because people do not know how to take this and look at it differently than say, HubSpots Website, Twitter and Facebook Graders.

• Here are some of AdWords Performance Grader features which are some what familiar to me as Clickable probably offer something similar, and Adwords, itself, offers campaign ideas:
  • Effective 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

But the differences between Clickable, Adwords and WordStream end there – WordStream’s data is probably much larger than Clickable, I suspect, and there is no need to actually use WordStream to get the benefit of the Adwords Performance Grader, while with Clickable, you must be a client – and the spend levels of Clickable are at a certain mid-level range while WordStream’s are wide open.

Here are a few demo screenshots of a sample account.

The nice thing about WordStream’s Adwords Performance Grader is it works with best practices – it tells campaign owners how their campaigns could improve – and no doubt, would improve using WordStream’s platform (which is, in itself, a way to measure the progress and investment in WordStream).

When speaking with Larry Kim yesterday, I asked him if Industry Categorization would be added later on, and he seemed to say, yes.  I’ll take that as a fully qualified “Yes” and we can expect Adwords Performance Grader to get better and better as time goes on.

Also, I think the investment in developing an automated tool such as Performance Grader shows the right use of technology – Larry correctly reasoned he is getting enough requests of this type every week to make it worth his while to take some of the repetitive work out of doing the research – all to our benefit.  The number of requests also speaks to a need for these kind of information, since Larry was asked so often about it.

And while the information Adwords Performance Grader gets is diagnostic in nature – it’s valuable because people have not really had an easy way to gauge what they should be expecting to see from an optimized campaign, vs. one that is not.   It’s easy to imagine people come into a situation with Paid Search where they will ask for the sun and moon, and I talk a lot about that in my Social Media Analytics book, especially Chapters 7,8 and 10.

While there are no universally determined values of benchmarks for good AdWords campaigns, AdWords Performance Grader from WordStream goes a remarkably long way towards establishing standards for this.