AdWatcher is an all-in-one tool that monitors your ad campaigns for fraudulent activity, helps you track your Return on Investment (ROI), and manages your online advertising from one place.
Boris Mordkovich, Co-Founder and Director of Operations at MordComm, the company that develops Adwatcher, kindly agreed to answer a few of my questions:
The Interview
Q: Boris, can you give us a small introduction to AdWatcher ?
Absolutely. The informal way to describe AdWatcher would be as a tool that helps advertisers who promote themselves via Pay-Per-Click, banners, emails, etc. get a better handle on their ad campaigns. Our typical clients are busy business owners or a marketing professionals that have a million of things to do every day. Not only they must make decisions about how to advertise and grow their business, but they also have to monitor and track their efforts to make sure their ads are working well. Our job is to empower the them and help him or her make the right decisions about their advertising dollars based on the data we collect and analyze.
Q: What’s the most important feature in Adwatcher, as you see it ?
AdWatcher, while offering a wide arrange of features, primarily focuses on two elements: click fraud detection and ROI tracking.
The click fraud element analyzes every click that comes in, detects suspicious activity, prevents it from happening again in the future and helps to actually get the refunds from the search engines.
ROI Tracking focuses on analyzing the conversions and showing the advertiser precisely what works and what doesn’t, what brings in sales and what simply wastes their money, which landing pages can convert best, and so on.
Between the two of them, our clients can get a good idea of how their campaigns are doing and what needs to be improved.
Q: How does AdWatcher set apart from the competition ? (Mainly ClickDefense, ClickTracks, iWebTrack etc.)
Good question. First of all, I’ll be the first one to admit that ClickDefense, ClickTracks and others are great companies and have their strong points, as well. If you think about it, all of us are trying to offer similar things to our clients. The differences, however, begin when you actually start using the service. We are different because of what we offer, the way we develop our software, and our philosophy towards our customers.
When you begin using one service or the other is when you see the crucial difference of a software designed by professionals for the user in mind. The ease-of-use, quick learning curve, intuitive interface – that’s what makes our software stand out and ultimately what will allow you to get the most out of it. After all, what’s the point of hundreds of reports and features if you can’t figure out how to use them?
All of our features that has been perfected over the years and improved based on customer’s suggestions and industry changes. We know that advertisers are looking for tools that will put them in control, give them the information they need quickly and accurately, protect their campaigns against click fraud and help them get refunds from the search engines. We do it all and we do it well.
Q: What’s Adwatcher’s client target ? Only for search professionals ? What’s the price ?
To illustrate our target market, let me describe to you our typical client. It’s somebody that spends anywhere between $1,500 per month to $50,000 per month on online advertising. Oftentimes, it’s a business owner or a busy advertising manager that has to wear multiple hats, has multiple responsibilities and very little time. So, we try to cater to them by doing all the number crunching and analysis ourselves and presenting the information to them in a simple, easy to understand format from which they can draw conclusions and make further decisions.
Many of our clients are search professionals, yes. However, the bulk of them consists of business owners, e-commerce store operators and advertising managers that I described above.
In terms of the price, our service starts at $29.95 per month. However, we do offer a free 30-day trial because we want people to try us and see what we can do for them.
Q: Can you tell us about the affiliate system ? What’s the payout, how many affiliates are in the system now …
Our affiliate program is actually a very important aspect of our business. We have over 300 affiliates, many of whom are also our clients, that constantly refer their colleagues and associates to AdWatcher. We recently switched from offering a one-time commission to a 25% residual for-life payment. We feel that it better serves our affiliates and provides them with a long-term reward for every new client they send to us.
Q: What other products does MordComm offer ?
While AdWatcher was the first product we developed and still our flagship one, we have expanded our offerings to serve the needs of our clients.
In the software division, we operate AdScientist (www.adscientist.com). It’s an automated bid management software that can manage all of the keywords across all the major search engines completely automatically. In other words, you simply assign preferred bids or positions for your keywords and it does all the work for you.
In addition to that, we have another exciting project that we’ve been working on. It’s the first – and currently the only – quarterly print magazine for search engine advertisers: Search Marketing Standard. It was launched over a year ago and has gathered over 42,000 readers since then.
It’s actually working out really well, since it gives us the ability to educate prospects first and then offer them the tools to manage their campaigns better.
Me: Boris, thank you for the interview, and keep up the good work.
Cristian, the pleasure is all mine. If anybody has any questions about our products or search engine marketing, I’m always available (and generally respond same day!). Thanks! Boris
And thanks Krumel for letting me know about the AdWatcher
Hello,
I really enjoyed your comments on AdWatcher i liked how their product is and i thank you very much for the accuracy.
I just got done reading another review from http://www.trackingsoftwarereviews.com, im the type of person who has to see it for myself and if i read something from one source i have to make sure that it is reliable. This supports what they said. Thank you for providing accurate information and supporting what i read from them.
Thanks again for providing good information and not commercialized information like a lot of sources i read.
-Spencer
Beware Adwatcher has cost my business thousands of dollars. On August 28th of this year I became concerned as my sales had plummeted the trend began 4 days earlier, I was informed by a friend that my pay per click advertisements were not functioning and that was when my nightmare began I realized that the URL redirect links that Adwatcher uses were not redirecting any of my pay per click advertisements to my home page, on Google alone we lost over $8000.00 wasted advertising, to say the least it was catastrophic. The scariest part was trying to fathom how long it would have taken the Adwatcher personnel to figure out what was happening had I not caught on to what was happening. When I informed Adwatcher what was happening and asked them to remit compensation for their negligence this was the reply I received from their director of operations Boris Mordkovich:
Dear Nick,
My name is Boris Mordkovich and I’m the Director of Operations at AdWatcher.com.
I wanted to contact you regarding what has happened in the beginning of the week with your account. I apologize for what has occurred and for the loss that you suffered as a result of that. And we certainly want to make it up to you in every way that we can.
Unfortunately, we won’t be able to reimburse for your advertising expenses. We simply don’t have that kind of money available for that. And as we do outline in the terms of service that every new client has to agree to before signing up, our liability is limited to the cost of AdWatcher service.
However, as I mentioned, we do want to try to make this right.
First, we will refund the last 3 months of service costs and will offer the AdWatcher account to you free of charge for the next year (if you still wish to use it). We can also offer you a free year of service for our AdScientist tool – which can help you manage your search engine bids automatically.
Second of all, if you are interested, we can refer you to one of our expert consulting partners to go over your campaigns and help you improve your conversion rates further. We would cover the fees incurred by that. While it won’t make up for your loss, it will help you fine tune your campaigns for the future and will lower your acquisition costs.
Nick, as I mentioned earlier, we do want to do everything we can to help you recover from this. There are certain limits to what we can offer, but we’ll do as much as we can.
All they could offer me after literally tossing my business off a cliff was this pathetic apology and and some band aid compensation as if we would ever trust them again after what happened. The result has been catastrophic I would strongly advise anyone who currently uses them or is thinking of using them to think twice as they assume absolutely no accountability for their negligence. We trusted Adwatcher with the most important aspect of our companies existence as the majority of our revenue is driven through pay per click advertising and they not only dropped the ball they were too stupid to realize it or to take accountability for the damages we have incurred due to their negligence. I cannot believe that a company which assumes the responsibility which they do did not have a single safeguard in place to prevent something like this from happening. Our decision to use this company has been a regrettable all companies make mistakes however the good ones take accountability for them they don’t hide behind some disclaimer statement that dissolves them of negligence. The sad part is that these guys actually think that this is going to hold up in court, if this were the case then we wouldn’t need lawyers would we everyone could just write a disclaimer that says hey we can do whatever the **** we want and assume no responsibility for it.
This is Matt Alland, the new Business Development Manager at AdWatcher. I’d like to mention that we take each of our client’s needs seriously, and that our own success relies fully on the success of our clients. If a problem or confusion does arise we encourage you to contact us. I’d be happy to answer any questions, my email is matt@adwatcher.com or we can be reached via phone at 1-800-543-9579.