I want to tip the hat to the ultra cool adCenter Add-in Beta for Excel 2007. Initially released in January 2008 it is maturing as a tool and in my opinion sets a direction that native and 3rd party search engine management / optimization tools should follow.
It is so powerful to be able to have keyword discovery, traffic forecasting, and monetization info directly in Excel. The next logical step is that they need full campaign management via this add-in metaphor. Why ever is there a need to login to a search engine ad / keyword / campaign management UI?
Google’s Adwords Editor is a great tool also and of course includes full management features… but you end up exporting information out to Excel anyway. Why not just use Excel as the Adwords Editor client? Why not stream campaign / ad group / keyword reports directly to Excel?… or have them queued up on a server and once they are ready get a notification in Excel and then stream them in directly?
Salesforce.com power users have discovered the wonders of sForce Connector and the tools to get data base information in and out of Salesforce via Excel. It’s sooo nice. Microsoft is bringing similar functionality (we hope) to search marketing.
Whatever your persuasion is on Microsoft, they have spent billions of dollars building Excel into an amazing client for managing tabular and pivoted data. What not everyone may recognize is that Excel is also a Web services ready application platform as well.
Now, if Microsoft buys Yahoo!’s search business maybe we’ll have a material amount of referrals to use these tools to optimize our campaigns with!
As you can tell I love this concept