The Finch Blog

Published on Tuesday, 12 February 2013 17:36

Written by Jason Lowry

A lot has been written about simplicity when designing products. Often the most elegant and timeless products are those that are simple. But designing a product to be simple to use and intuitive is actually much harder than it sounds.

For an amateur software user interface designer, they typically look at the requirements and then create a button or menu item to fulfill each requirement. They stop there. A master designer will refine this by asking questions like, ‘Which buttons are really required?’ -- ‘Which buttons are most used?’ -- ‘In which order are the buttons likely to be accessed?’ A common phrase in the software design industry is, “Well designed software doesn’t require documentation to understand it.”

Which brings me to the simplicity of Finch. Finch really has only two settings for the user:

1. The Cost Goal - The percentage you’re willing to spend to make an online sale (our Cost per Value model) or the amount you’re willing to spend to find a lead (Cost per Action). A CPV goal may be 30%, or 30 cents per dollar. A CPA goal might be $50 per lead.
2. The Budget - The amount you’re willing to spend per month on AdWords. This isn’t a setting inside Finch; it’s the AdWords budget that you’re already using. Of course, as we’ve written before, if Finch is meeting your cost goal, then you should increase the budget.

Back to the above discussion on simplicity: Let’s say Finch gave you a bunch of buttons to push and dials to turn. What would you do with them? There are two scenarios:

1. You paid for a tool with lots of buttons and dials. You had better push and turn them to get your money’s worth out of the tool. But if what you have is a super-charged AdWords dashboard that lets you make more changes faster, does that meet your goal of making more money? Or does it make you feel good because you are doing a lot of stuff quickly? Usually this just results in too many changes too fast, and you get lost in what you are trying to accomplish.
2. You would have to learn how to push buttons and turn dials correctly in order to get good performance. The downside of having to learn new software is the learning curve and the time it takes to manage, adjust, tune, review, and repeat to gain the output you are looking for from the software.

In both scenarios, you are accountable for your account performance. If your performance tanks, then the vendor could simply say you turned one dial up too much and pushed the wrong button. Not so with Finch! We want to be accountable for your performance so we continue to earn your business.

Finch is easy to learn because there’s really nothing new for you to learn. We ask that you optimize your ads more effectively than what you’ve been used to doing and that you get to know AdWords reporting better -- But when you want to beat your competition, some effort is required. We discuss additional details about your part of optimization in a Frequently Asked Questions category named ‘Your Responsibilities and Optimizing Ads.’

We’re confident that our way of doing things will simplify your AdWords experience and provide you with more profitable results.