Why should I buy an ad monitoring tool versus building one?
Many advertisers, agencies, affiliate networks, and OPMs believe they would be better off building a monitoring tool in-house versus buying a service from a provider like The Search Monitor. Below is a list of the reasons why buying is better than building when it comes to ad monitoring.
- Code Changes: The search engines are constantly changing their code. The Search Monitor, for example spends 10-20 hours every week detecting the changes, learning about them, contacting the engines, and then adjusting our technology so that our monitoring technology captures reliable results. The search engines are notorious for providing little notice and detail on changes they made. This can easily become an IT Engineer’s part-time job.
- Big Data: The data quantity you need to store is massive. Imagine 166 countries and 150+ different languages. Then imagine collecting data for every US state, metro area, and city. It’s huge. And if you want to crawl hourly like The Search Monitor does, it gets even massiver (is that a word? Probably not. But it gets the point across.)
- Easy Interfaces: You need an easy-to-use interface to access and filter this massive amount of data to produce something relevant
- Reporting & Exporting: You need flexibility in reports and exports. Some items need to be stored as URLs so they are easy to forward to the clients, partners, or the search engines
- Scheduling & Alerts:You need a scheduling tool for your reports and your tools that is triggered by some pre-set activity
- Team of Search Experts: You need a team of search engine experts to help make sense of some of the more confusing things that are captured.
- Client Validation: When you use a provider like us, you benefit from our ability to validate our data estimates (e.g., ad spend and CTR) against our network of 1,000+ clients across 22 different verticals.
If you require a custom branded solution, that is not a problem – we are capable of white labeling. White Labeling Features Include:
- Branded Header & Footer. Your brand is the only one that is seen, The Search Monitor branding is removed.
- Vanity URL. Used for login pages, help center, and system sent emails.
- Support. We support you. You will provide direct support to your clients.
- Admin Center. The admin center provides you with login access to client accounts, ability to view your full client list.
- Monitoring Frequency Control. Some packages allow back-door access to control crawler settings.
Posted in: Why Work With The Search Monitor