Yesterday, the much-anticipated Ask Sponsored Listings update went live. The 2.0 version of Ask’s relatively new paid search program, includes improvements to daily budgeting, billing, uploading, campaign management, and reporting. Was the update an improvement? Will it encourage us to work more with Ask in the future? We put two of our campaign and media managers head to head in a Point/Counterpoint debate:
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Point: ASL Has A+ Reporting By Joel Lapp |
Counterpoint: ASL is Lost In Translation By John Chan |
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Everything about Ask’s new Sponsored Listings is easier to work with. As an account manager, the key improvements that affect my business are:
The new ASL 2.0 is a benefit not only to our workflow, but to our clients. Thanks to better usability, budget management, and more flexible reporting, our relationship with Ask will certainly improve. |
All the new bells and whistles are excellent, but we need to take some time to find out if they actually work. We’ll be thrilled if Ask.com has a truly functional budget tool, but considering the difficulty that other engines have managing budget caps, we’re not keeping our fingers crossed. Furthermore, we have to question Ask’s ability to even deliver that kind of traffic. Ask’s distribution and audience behavior has to improve in order for the updates to have an impact. UI and management improvements are meaningless without reliable, better-converting volume. At the end of the day, we’re looking for the right audience.
As for the UI, while the changes to ASL were necessary, the system is still pretty cumbersome. Quite frankly, Google has the most sophisticated grouping system for campaigns, and we’re accustomed to working with their terminology. ASL is missing the crucial “ad group” level within the campaign that allows us to bucket several different groups of words under a single heading. The mixed terminology doesn’t work in Ask’s favor, since they’re newcomers to an already established market. Ask’s UI has been historically difficult to work with and they’ve given us little volume that actually converts for our metrics-based clients. That’s not to say we won’t be working with them, but Ask hasn’t yet proven critical for inclusion in campaigns, and it’ll take awhile to see if the new ASL can deliver results. |
Feel free to send in your comments with a new spin on ASL 2.0. Which side of the debate are you on?
