As you known recently we had 3-days holidays, so today I would like to tell you what became the reason for celebration. February 23 is a holiday that observed in Russia called Defender of Fatherland Day.  Let’s go back in history and find out what is it, Defender of Fatherland Day?!  Like many Russian holidays Defender of Fatherland Day has its roots in the Soviet Union.  23 February was memorable event during the Russian Civil War when the Red Army started successful campaign for control of the country after the revolutions of 1917.

At the beginning Defender of Fatherland Day celebrate people who were involved in serving the Russian Armed Forced, however  eventually 23 February became the national celebration of men as a whole.

The “population” of Orbitscripts includes in generally more men than women, so we, orbit-girls, have faced the problem of how to make really great holiday for our defenders. Finally, we have found creative ideas how we could celebrate this unusual holiday.  Every men is like a child, and I know that our girls-readers will agree with us, so we’ve decided that we’ll make time traveling to the past when they were little boys. We have spent a lot of time laughing and just enjoying being together as we’re one team.

The next holiday will be International Women’s day on March 8, and we’re excitingly waiting for that day.

All the way developing SmartPPC 7 I was thinking about the problem of reaching end users of our system, I mean: publishers and advertisers.

As you know, we develop our software for people who are developing advertising services. So our customers act as a middle man at this point, making it hard for us to reach the end users.

“How, how can we get acquainted with the end users, how can we get their complaints and wishes”, — I was wondering.

Recently I realized: we shouldn’t. Our clients are administrators. They are our users, so we must do all we can for them.

But concern about end user is an administrator task. So if we care about administrator, and they have necessity to care about their users, we must provide all possibilities for that.

Though difference can seem subtle (we shouldn’t care about end users we should care of helping administrators care about end users) it is very important, it puts my thoughts about SmartPPC 7 in order.

In many cases in SmartPPC 7 I wasn’t able to simplify interface ’cause, though for most cases the simplification was suitable, there always were cases where simplification was inappropriate.

The conclusion above tells me that from now on I shouldn’t worry about it, I should design the more functionality I can. To simplify is the task of administrator. My task is to help administrator with this simplification.

That is why I made a proposition to our boss: we must make SmartPPC 7 as functional and as flexible as possible, but leave wide opportunities for it simplification for the concrete task.

This means that, due to my plan, the core SmartPPC 7 will allow you to create a really big and complicated service. You’ll be able to create AdWord, AdBrite and, e. g., BuySellAds combined in one solution.

But in most cases concrete administrators won’t need all this stuff, so there will be an opportunity to reduce and simplify the final system.

The first reduction will be made by as. We will separate SmartPPC 7 by products.
For example, EVO owners don’t need features for bulk work with thousands of ad channels, ‘case they usually have only one site and several channels. So EVO interface is going to be much simplier then AdMarket one. Search owner, i think, will need only keyword based campaigns, and so on…

The second way of simplification that I have in mind is custom usability service. This means that, if boss approve, we will provide a service, ordering which administrators will be able to tune the product usability for the needs of their particular users. I think I will personally make necessary investigations and work out suggestions.

I really hope I thought it out well and boss will accept my proposal. Or may be even improve it. We’ll see.

Dear past, present and future customers of our products, do you read this blog?

What would you like us to write here? What are you interested in?

In SmartPPC 7 we are going to implement some really big and interesting features (several types of campaigns (sic!), a cart system for site directory, statistics charts, easy e-mail system and many, many more). But we also don’t forget about small details.

I’ve made an investigation of bids editors in different systems. There are two general approaches: small form with “Save” button for each bid (Google, SmartPPC 6 and Yahoo use it) and without any forms, but with “Save” button for the whole page (this type is the choice of Microsoft, Begun and Yandex).

But advantages and disadvantages of this approaches are not a matter of this discussion actually. Lets look at small forms design.

As I said Google and SmartPPC 6 use small forms:

If you’ll look fixedly at those forms you can see a big problem — buttons spatial distribution is erroneous. The problem is that gestures for safe (clicking “Save” button, green line) operation and unsafe one (clocking “Cancel”, red line) are too similar. That is why you can easily miss the button.

Both SmartPPC 6 from:

and Google one:

has this drawback. Google gestures are even more dangerous.

The design of this kind leads to frequent mistakes and frustration. And don’t forget that bids tuning is an every day advertiser job. So, small but every day frustrations can turn into a really big disappointment.

If we will use small forms approach in SmartPPC 7 (we are discussing it), we’ll use form like that:

As you see “Save” and “Cancel” buttons differ not only in weight (button vs link) and color but also spatially separated. So gestures themselves will extremely reduce errors.

Left for bad. Right for good.

As you know we have our own search engine SmartPPC Search. The cool thing about it is that it aggregates search results from several well known engines like Google, Yahoo etc.

To make it even better, from the beginning of this week, we decided to use only SmartPPC Search in our everyday work. This means that from now on all search engines are banned in Orbitscripts office, and only SmartPPC Search is left.

After two days we have already got about ten complaints and ideas from our team, so, I’m sure that now we’ll have plenty of ideas for next of SmartPPC Search.

In the new SmartPPC 7 you won’t be made to give names to campaigns. So you wont see this again:

Instead names are going to be created automatically.

There is a slight problem with that. If you are an untidy person (like I am) It may happen that you will never give sensible names to your campaigns. In that case you’ll get a situation that you might meet in Google AdWords:

Yeah, a lot of campaigns and all of them have name “Campaign #N”. And it is really tricky to distinguish them.

To overcome this problem, but still don’t make you fill names, we are planning to implement a curious Names Generation Algorithm which will invent still useless but not so similar names.

This means that if you ara an untidy person, in SmartPPC 7 you will have you campaigns list look something like that:

Angle brackets tells you that name was generated automatically.

As on one hand most of our customers are Americans and on the other hand American culture is wide spread, Names Generation Algorithm will use words and phrases from American films, show etc.

Making an interesting dictionary of well known for Americans phrases is quite complicated task for us, Russians, so we would appreciate your help and ideas of how this could be done.

One of the cool features that we are planning to implement in the new SmartPPC 7 is, how we have called it, a “Tuturial wizard”.

Wizard is a quite common interface pattern that is used for guiding user through a number of steps. I’m sure you have seen one when installing programs in Windows.

One of the steps of Windows Live setup wizard

In advertising software wizards are frequently used to guide user through a campaign creation process, ‘cause it can be tricky when you face it for the first time. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft do have such wizards as well as SmartPPC 6.

SmartPPC 6 cost per click campaign creation wizard

Besides campaign creation advertising software must provide a way to edit already created campaigns which is usually implemented with the use of different kinds of small (e.g. in-place) editors.

Edition of already created Ad Group in Google Adwords

This practice, when you have one way to create something and another way to edit it, isn’t perfect. It leads to an inconsistent user experience which in turn ends up with a bad habits getting and double user interface complexity.

It would be much better to have one interface for both creation and edition of campaigns. This would help new users to become extended ones faster. But how can one interface be used if we need to guide new users and give fast edition tools to experienced ones?

We have found a solution — it is a “Tutorial wizard”. So, SmartPPC 7 will have one interface for both creation and edition of campaigns which is pretty cool.

We haven’t invented anything new, we have just adopted a very common idea that has been used for years in computer games, especially strategic ones.
In such games you are often offered to start playing with a tutorial campaign in which you are being guided through the game interface and features.

Total War Empire tutorial campaign

SmartPPC 7 will use exactly the same idea of guiding. It will have an interface for edition and it will guide you through the same interface while creation campaigns.

This is a very raw prototype of how it may look like. The list of campaign ad groups in edition mode:

Group selection step in the campaign creation wizard:

As you see a wizard is just a semitransparent layer which guides you through the campaign edition interface.

There are some problems in program implementation of the Tutorial wizard, but I’m sure our programmers will handle them and, with our soft, advertisers will have an opportunity to fulfill their every everyday tasks fast and consistent.

Hello dear readers of Orbitscripts blog!

My name is Nick Toverovskiy and I’m a new Orbitscripts interface designer. This means that from now on Orbitscripts products will have not only the unique and outstanding functionality but also a powerful but extremely easy-to-use user interface which I hope you’ll love.

SmartPPC 7 — is a new big version that we have started developing about a month ago. And it is going to be some kind of a revolution ‘cause interface will be totally redesigned in order to make our products simpler, faster and even more powerful.

So, in my notes here I’ll tell you about interesting ideas we get, complicated problems we face and amusing decisions we make developing SmartPPC 7.

Long story short, you’ll be able to peep at our development process.

See you soon, best regards,
Nick Toverovskiy

We’re pleased to let you know that SmartPPC Ad Market Video Lessons are available now! Online education video tutorials can help administrators, advertisers and publishers to better understand UI of the SmartPPC Ad Market system. Administrator and publishers will get to know how to start selling ad placements (channels) on their websites. Advertisers will learn how to display ads on administrators’ and publishers’ websites.

If you are an Administrator SmartPPC Ad Market Video Lessons assist you to build your own ad network from scratch. You will learn how to get advertising revenue and increase traffic to your site with a lesser time.

If you are an Advertiser SmartPPC Ad Market Video Lessons assist you to create your CPM/Flat Rate or CPC ad campaigns, create ad groups, manage targeting and scheduling; teach you how to pay up in the system. With SmartPPC Ad Market advertisers will spend their money effectively and target the right audience with the help of robust reporting features.

If you are a Publisher SmartPPC Ad Market Video Lessons assist you to monetize your websites traffic and drive revenue without making any seed investments in running your own direct advertising. You’ll learn how to add your websites into SmartPPC Ad Market system, so that advertisers could display their ads on your websites. With powerful tools you will get to know how to keep track of your performance.

At the moment we’re looking forward to provide you with more lessons. SmartPPC EVO and SmartPPC Search video lessons are coming soon.

We hope these video lessons will provide you with some helpful tips to your ad business.

If you have any suggestions or ideas feel free to contact us.

Nowadays search traffic is the single most valuable form of internet traffic. Every day, millions and millions of people use different search engines to find things in Internet and face with ads links. Those little ads have turned search engines like Google and Yahoo into biggest advertising vehicles the world has ever seen. You can easily become a part of this valuable traffic by creating your own search engine with SmartPPC Search.

You may ask yourself: why would you want your own search engine? Well, there is a secret which are most search engine keep hidden that we’re going to tell you. They make money from displaying other search engines’ ads. Yes, that’s right. They don’t have their own advertisers. But they still make lots of money. And now, you can too!

There a numerous pay per click search engines that will give you their advertisers to put on your search engine, and when someone clicks on the ads from your search engine, they give you a piece of the pay per per click price. All of this is integrated right into SmartPPC Search. Simply, build your search engine using SmartPPC Search, pull their ads in, and get revenue. You can launch your search engine on its own dedicated site, or plug it into your existing site, so your users can search from there.

The basic version of SmartPPC Search supports web search, search by images and news search. For starters, there is no need to build and develop your own index and algorithms. We have that done for you! SmartPPC operates as a meta-search, using Google, Yahoo and Bing as data sources. We have also built in numerous social features, such as My Page and search comments. Think of the possibilities, you can bring together Google, Yahoo and Bing together in one mix, or create any mix you want, simply by clicking on options in SmartPPC. SmartPPC Search is built for speed: The system uses technologies that can handle millions searches daily.

The intuitive interface of SmartPPC Search administrative control panel enables you to adjust the system within minutes. Many flexible and useful settings can be easily managed.

There are several ways of mixing sponsored and organic search results. All paid ads may be displayed on the first page before organic search results. Or you can choose an alternative – output several sponsored results on every page.

SmartPPC Search lets you to:

• Control your own infrastructure
• Customize the software look and feel to meet your specific needs
• Use XML feeds to run ads on your website (Ad providers)
• Extend the system with the Plug-ins framework
• Control your own spider to search specific web sites (Orbit Spider)
• Custom programming (contact us)

SmartPPC Search can be integrated with SmartPPC EVO and SmartPPC Ad Market. Combination of SmartPPC Search with other solutions makes up a new system – search engine with advanced ad management functions. This will give you the opportunity to sell to your own advertisers directly, and include them within the mix.

Try demo today.

Build your own pay per click business and make high income!