Ad Agency Survey Conclusions and Winners
A couple of months ago I reached out to our Ad Agency customers. I asked them two simple questions:
- What do you LOVE about Ad Agency?
- How can we improve about Ad Agency?
We received dozens of fascinating responses, and I’d like to share some of them with you.
What do our customers love?
Stephen Bruce loves that he can hand this revenue-generating solution to customers who have no Web development knowledge:
“Automating ad space revenue helps my clients who don’t understand Web development. It’s simple for them to just approve ad submissions, and the system does the rest. “
Stephen Hawkins (not that Stephen Hawkins!) loves beating Google:
“It puts the power of AdWords in the complete beginner’s hand in a simple, user-friendly yet powerful way… giving the potential of making AdWords a second choice. Defeating Google is always good.”
Antonis Prelorentzos loves the targeting possibilities and the ad flexibility:
“I love the targeting options that an agent can set from the backend and also the possibility to have roles and zones in a complex system so the ads can be set up in different types.”
A few answers mentioned they love the integration with JomSocial. Canet said:
“Compatible with all Joomla and other social [products] like JomSocial.”
Many wrote that they loved Ad Agency’s simplicity and ease of use:
“Easy to configure and use.”
“Simple to use, functional and practical.”
“Ease and efficiency of ad management.”
And Jon A. Arbay summed it all up perfectly:
“Seamless integration and stability of the product.”
So how can we improve?
Many customers said they wanted more documentation and help:
Theo Chambers said:
“Better documentation and Snagit videos with a few examples from point A to point Z. Develop a serious social media campaign on how to monetize your website or blog using Ad Agency. Training a few affiliates to be trainers… and giving them for example 25% or more on each package they purchase. Ad Agency is the most powerful UNKNOWN web and blog monetizer! “
Jon A. Arbay wrote:
“More support for the novice Web people.”
Kimberley Barreda wrote:
“Better documentation on how to set up packages using stream ads [and a] nicer layout of advertiser dashboard.”
Jens Kirk suggested we add AdWord-like features, with weighting for impressions.
“Just like on Google AdWords where we are allowed to speed up an ad or let it be more slow and cheap.”
Silke Schäfers said:
“Multi-language support and invoices with tax declaration.”
Stephen Hawkins wants an improved user interface…:
“Bring the design of the backend (front end too) more to the tune of scripts such as phpmydirectory in all of your scripts…”
…and a better support forum:
“I find it really difficult to find answers in there regarding Ad Agency or Publisher. It seems that the mix between Premium Paid Support and Free User Forum is getting messed up a lot. It’s not very intuitive and what seems intuitive such as clicking My Recent Posts/My Posts displays nothing.”
We didn’t like it either which is why we recently switched to HelpScout. It delivers a much better user experience.
Ole Avranden said:
“The thing I miss the most in Ad Agency is the possibility to place the ad module in the content (via Modules Anywhere), and keep the possibility to use keywords as a trigger.”
Actually, both those options are available. You can place modules inside content by using the [loadposition position] tag and you can target by keywords.
Peter Kaminski wanted a faster response in the backend… and support for HTML 5:
“We have about 100 ads simultaneously, so if we change a special ad or something else, it needs sometimes 15 seconds for a response of the GUI.”
That sounds pretty serious so if you could post a ticket with this issue, Peter, we’ll look into it. We may need to improve the code, so it would be good to see a live example.
“Also support for HTML 5 would be fine. Our customers sometimes ask if we support HTML 5 ads.”
That’s on our radar for sure! We’ll deliver better reporting via email, complete with a logo and an improved layout. Look out for it.
Kimberley Barreda wanted to be able to put the same ad in multiple zones of the same size, and she also had an idea to get advertisers up and running faster:
“Automatic advertiser approval instead of them waiting.”
This one might not be such a great idea, but if there’s demand, we’ll implement it. Please comment below if you like this idea.
Video advertising is certainly on our radar, as suggested by Rob Manser.
“Video pre-roll and post-roll options to tie in with JomSocial videos.”
Howard Duggan wants to be able to clear old stats again:
“Clear old stats function desperately needs to be re-introduced.”
This was an oversight in the new design. We will bring it back ASAP.
Antonis Prelorentzos had a think and came up with a number of good points:
“I think there are four main things that could be improved in Ad Agency:
- The system can have more specific geo-targeting options.
- The ability to cooperate with other modules so that the results of keywords could be more dimensional and accurate.
- The ability to get user profile info for best targeting… such as gender, age etc.
- A more complex way to count clicks… could help a lot for the system to be fairer to advertisers. This could include rules that count clicks per session, per IP, per specific time, etc.
- A way to give advertisers in their profile a more specific image of the success of their ads with different kinds of statistical choices.”
There’s a lot there for us to think about but #4 is already done in integration with JomSocial. Please post a comment with more details about the other points.
Justin Dixon wrote:
“We had to stop using for our clients because all ads would disappear when cache was enabled. Have contacted support without ever getting replies back. Would be nice if this was resolved.”
We are looking into this. Hopefully, we will have a solution soon!
Conclusion:
What stood out most to me was the request for more help in implementing Ad Agency successfully. I also noticed some of the requested features are in place already which means we didn’t do a good job communicating them to you.
We will start by creating more resources, then move on to implementing some of the features you suggested. More details soon!
The Winners:
- 1st place: All iJoomla products ($1044 value!) – Stephen Hawkins
- 2nd place: Guru Pro ($299 value!) – Theo Chambers
- 3rd place: Socialize template ($99 value!) – Antonis Prelorentzos
Thanks to everybody who participated! We look forward to implementing your ideas and continuing to give you the best ad management tool for Joomla!
