ClickEquations Blog

Target, Value, Satisfy, Understand. That’s the mantra of High Resolution PPC.

The idea is to stop thinking about mechanical components like keywords and bids, and instead focus on a logical marketing progression.

We want the tools to support our work process instead of having to build a work process that serves the tools.

The First Step is Targeting

Targeting means showing your ads to the right people. Paid search ads are delivered as answers to questions. People type in a search query and you pay for the privilege of having your ad be one potential answer to that question.

So you must know:

• What questions do you want to answer?
• What answers do you plan on giving to those questions.

Campaigns, Ad-Groups, and Keywords are your targeting tools.

Keep in mind that they’re called ad-groups, not keyword-groups. The goal is to segregate keywords, controlled using the match-type option, so that all the queries attracted by a single ad-group are questions answered by the text-ads in the ad-group.

In other words, you want every searcher to see a a text-ad that is directly relevant to their search. To do that, you must organize your ad-groups around the search queries they attract, not the keywords they contain. Every search query that causes your text ads to be displayed, should be highly relevant to the text ad that is displayed.

Let’s illustrate with an example.

Supposed you knew that all of the following search queries would be coming into your account, and you could hand match them to appropriate text-ads before the results page was delivered to the searcher.

• Discount Dyson Vacuum
• Dyson Vacuum Features
• Dyson Vacuum Coupons
• Compare Dyson Vacuums
• Cheap Dyson Vacuum
• Dyson Extra Cyclone

Wouldn’t you want the 3 price-related queries to get a price focused text ad, and the three feature related queries to get a feature-related text ad? Doesn’t it make sense that this would produce the highest click-through-rates and the highest ROI?

Yes, of course.

This is why you have to think about queries not just keywords, and use ad-groups to target the groups of people you want to talk to.

The Second Step is Valuing

Once we’ve targeted the right people using different ad-groups, we can then look inside the ad-group and take advantage of the fact that we don’t have to place the same value on everyone in that group.

Match-Types, Negative Keywords, and Bids are some the core valuing tools.

Extending our previous example, suppose experience tells us that people who search for ‘Cheap Dyson Vacuum’ just don’t buy from us (we’re not that cheap). That has no value, so we add ‘cheap’ or ‘cheap dyson vacuum’ as a negative. But ‘Dyson Extra Cyclone’ is a very specific feature so people who search on that are far into the buying process, we see that query frequently with a high conversion rate. Make that an exact match and bid it up.

You get the idea. By correctly using these tools, watching our search queries and continually refining our campaigns, we can group queries within an ad-group, value them appropriately, and manage both budgets and returns.

The Third Step is Satisfying

People decide how well our paid search advertising does. They decide how to formulate queries which trigger our ads (or not) and they click (or don’t) and buy (or not).

Text-Ads, Landing Pages, and ultimately your offers, website, and checkout process are your satisfaction tools.

When we’re targeting accurately, and valuing properly, we have the ability to focus on satisfying those who see our ads and visit our site. Trying to do so before we’ve completed these steps means, by definition, that we’ve got too wide a range of people coming to really have a fair shot at measuring the results of any attempts at improvement.

There is little doubt that text-ad writing, let alone testing, is the paid search option that gets the least attention and effort as compared to its importance and potential impact. Rewriting a text ad and doubling performance – in terms of CTR which even if it does not improve conversion rate can proportionally increase revenue – is common. We’ve seen many ad re-writes produce 10x-20x CTR improvements. Try that with a better bid.

But writing is hard. Writing is subjective. Writing takes quite a lot of time. None of these make it less important.

All the same is true-er for landing pages, website experiences, and shopping carts. This all very hard, time consuming, and costly work. But it is ultimately directly responsible for the success or lack thereof of paid search campaigns. Even within whatever limitations exist, it should be considered, managed, and measured.

The Final Step is Understanding

Even in this greatly summarized view of the paid search process, there are a lot of moving parts. Each exists by the hundreds, thousands, or hundreds-of-thousands in typical campaigns. They occur tens-of-thousands of times every day as impression and click counts increment. And we have weeks and months of history for all of this to consider and trend.

Paid search can only be managed effectively if you can learn from this data – look into it and find information.

Website and Search Analytics are your tools for understanding.

This means knowing which metrics are important. And when trends are really trends. And how all the numbers affect each other.

It also means that you need the ability to get at the data that can inform you, and easily produce the reports and dashboards that will do so for both you and your colleages or managers.

The key is continuous improvement. Paid search campaigns are never perfect. And they exist in highly dynamic environments. Only through hard work to understand the campaign and know the best move to make next to improve it can you really drive great results.

Summary

The shift into the T-V-S-U mindset is a big one. It changes the process of managing paid search and the way you think about and use the options and tools the search engines provide. More importantly, it aligns your search and marketing goals, and makes it easier to prioritize your PPC efforts and measure your results along the way.

In future posts we’ll dig into each stage and step of this process in more detail. Have questions before then? I’d love to hear them, or your comments.

This post is part of a series on High Resolution PPC, a framework for understanding and managing paid search advertising.

ClickEquations was created because we wanted a more effective and efficient way to manage paid search campaigns.

We have years of PPC management experience, and have used many the top search management tools. We did a pretty thorough analysis of those we hadn’t tried ourselves. And we did some serious thinking about what it was we felt was missing.

The conclusion we came to was that not only did none of the available tools satisfy us from a feature perspective, but more importantly the philosophies on which they were built and the goals they seemed to have didn’t align with our beliefs about paid search management.

• Search is about people, not keywords.
• Math should drive decisions, not intuition.
• The PPC options and controls are interdependent.
• The tool should serve the search manager, not the search engine.

So we decided to build our own.

A lot of search agencies have built their own technology. But ours isn’t a skunkworks project.

We’re a venture-backed startup with leading SAAS-software investors including First Round Capital, Internet Capital Group, and Novitas Capital. Over the past few years we’ve built a complete development team, technical operations and customer support staff. And our management team has built and run market leading ecommerce and financial services software companies.

Development Vision
ClickEquations has been developed with a clear long term development vision in mind.

We want to apply as much mathematics and statistics to the management of paid search as possible. There is truth in the numbers, and power to be had in their analysis and algorithmic management.

But there is also a reality to the development sequence, and a lot of great things to deliver before we have the big magic ‘optimize everything’ button ready.

Data In/Data Out
The foundation of any paid search software platform has to be complete and accurate data. Everything that happens on top of that – reporting, management, recommendations, testing, automation – is only as good as the data.

So one important early effort in our development has been making sure we have complete and accurate data – from not one but six data sources that can be useful in reporting, analysis, and optimization.

Equally important is reporting – the ability to utilize the data for both decision making and communications. There are needs PPC managers have in their daily work, plus dashboards and summaries they are often asked to deliver for senior execs and clients. These should be screamingly fast and almost infinitely customizable.

Management & Bid Management
With comprehensive data and flexible reporting in place, the next natural step is the ability to make changes and take action – the core of what the category defines as paid search management.

As with data and reporting, with think it’s an opportunity to take a different approach.

Most tools blindly mimic the search engine interfaces, enabling editing and not much else. They fail to acknowledge the way the options are actually used, to connect the data that would drive you to want to change a variable to the ability to change that variable, or to consider any of the interactions and interdependence between options and controls.

Moving a control panel from one browser window to the next hardly seems worth doing.

Bid management is the emperor in the paid search management world, and while he’s not entirely naked he certainly doesn’t have nearly as many clothes on as some would like you to believe.

There is a lot that mathematical analysis can tell you about how your bid should be set – given one specific set of circumstances in terms of keywords, text-ads, match types, ad-group organization, and assuming you’ve got either a significant performance history on that specific keyword in those specific circumstances (and that they’ll all remain constant) or a collection of keywords with enough identifiable similarities that they can be intelligently grouped and considered as one.

We’ve got a comprehensive approach to bid management, so I’m in no way dismissing it as unimportant.

But buying/choosing/believing in a paid search management tool because of its ‘bid management’ capabilities is like believing you can win the Indy 500 if you just tune your carburetor perfectly.

There are other vital components in the system and if you essentially ignore them your chance for meaningful improvement is limited. But if you consider and manage the system, all things are possible.

The Interesting Stuff
Data, Reporting, and Management capabilities are the cornerstone of any paid search tool. But there are additional layers of capabilities that paid search managers need, and which we intend to deliver  – with tastes of each in early releases and focused effort as we move forward.

The reason is simple. Even when you have perfect data, flexible reporting, and the simple ability to add/edit/delete anything, paid search management would still not be effective and efficient.

It would be a world better than it is today, but you’d still be:

• Staring at tens-of-thousands of rows of data with the tough tasks of deciding what to do,
• Executing those changes and keeping track of them to determine whether or not they turned out to have positive effects, and
• Doing lots of manual labor and calculations where software could provide either process or full automation.

So Here’s Why
This gets to the crux of why we’ve built ClickEquations.

Paid search software today helps people to satisfy the needs of the search engine advertising platforms. Every bit of data and just about every option and control (aside from those in the bid-rule modules some provide) are designed to give the engines what they need to run your ads they way they want to run them.

We’re just tending to their machine – and paying for the privilege.

We want to turn that around. The experience of paid search management should be one of thinking about people and targeting prospects and customers – not managing keywords and worrying about 17 ways to say ‘buy a cheap car’.

It should be about valuing relationships and outcomes not bidding $0.98 on Sunday night and $2.49 on Wednesday at noon.

And it should be about managing interactions throughout the prospect/customer lifecycle, not trying to get ‘quality score’ points by using the terminology an external force thinks belongs on your landing page.

We’ll move in phases.

• First, you’ll get industry leading clarity into what’s going on so you can dramatically improve your understanding.
• Then, we’ll help you see patterns and opportunities and avoidable risks in new and clear ways.
• Later, we’ll provide a full set of algorithms that let you really stand up to their algorithms.

Slowly you’ll stop playing their game and start playing yours.

And In The End
Our goals are efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency means keeping constantly in mind that our software is supposed to make the job of managing paid search easier. Effectiveness means our software is supposed to drive better economic results.

These are big goals. These are long term visions. These are what drive us.

The initial release of ClickEquations is a great start, valuable and differentiated. We look forward to working with anyone who shares our views of the potential of search management software.

PS: For a limited time prior to our official launch, you can request an invitation to try ClickEquations for FREE for up to six months. If you qualify, you’ll be notified and we’ll have you up and running in a matter of days. Come on, try it!

• Everyone in paid search and online marketing should read and ponder this. Some serious questions. http://bit.ly/4i43BX #
• See the new ClickEquations demo days
  before the website goes live. http://bit.ly/4bknrf #
• Chips & Salsa & Beer – now at booth 115 shop.org #
• Final updates on new ClickEquations.com website now underway. Look for new site sometime this weekend (hopefully!) #

Since the dawn of time, paid search has been conceived of and managed based on four key components and common perceptions of their roles:

1. Keywords. Keywords define when your ads run. Choose keywords and phrases that people looking for your product or service would use.
2. Bids. Bids define how much you’re willing to pay when your ad appears for any particular keyword. Higher bids can help position your ads higher on the page and appear more frequently.
3. Text-Ads. Text-ads give you a headline and two lines of copy to attract and persuade searches to click and view your website.
4. Click/Conversion Reports. Basic reporting tells you how each keyword is doing, both individually and within campaigns, and ad-groups, in terms of clicks, conversion rates, and ROAS.

These four items remain important aspects of paid search today, but they’re not the most important variables, nor the best way to think about PPC.

We’re not operating in the same technical, competitive, or business environment as four or five years ago:

• In a world where changing definitions for match-type determine which queries cause your ads to run, worrying solely about keywords is inadequate.
• In a world where quality score has such a huge impact on where your ads run and how much you pay for them, worrying largely about bids is inadequate.
• In a world where a majority of your buyers visit your site multiple times before purchasing, text-ads remain important but must be considered in context of all user touchpoints.
• In a world where profitability is the real goal, then measuring intermediate metrics while ignoring the one that really matters – ROI – is illogical.

We’ve got a name for this old ‘keywords & bids’ view of the paid search world: ‘Low Resolution PPC’.

It was fine five or six years ago when the engines were simpler and the budgets smaller. It’s not fine anymore.

• Today you have to think about your user targeting based on the interaction of keywords, match types, and search queries.
• Today you have to think about your costs based on how quality scores and bids interact with match type keyword traps and negative keywords.
• Today you have to think about persuasion and conversion as a chain of events that starts with your text ad and continues through your landing page, your site, and the experience users have in your shopping cart.
• Today you have to think about analytics as a way to understand all of these variables and more.

It’s a high-def world, even in paid search marketing.

Introducing High Resolution PPC
But there’s more to High Resolution PPC than just a deeper consideration of the core mechanics of paid search.

We also want to shift the focus away from the mechanics of running paid ads and onto our relationship with the people to whom we’re advertising and how we manage that relationship.

We want to know who the people are conducting these searches, clarify why we want to talk to them, understand what will get their attention, and make sure to learn from our interactions with them so we can perform better in the future.

The Cornerstones of High Resolution PPC
In High Resolution PPC we manage our campaigns by using the options and controls in paid search to move clients through the marketing acquisition cycle.

Accordingly, we no longer think of search in terms of the four old cornerstones of paid search – keywords, bids, text ads, and operating reports – but instead in terms of the four stages of customer acquisition and management:

1. Target - To begin you define the focus of your efforts, using campaigns, ad-groups, and keywords to target specific groups of people who are asking the kinds of questions you want to answer with your paid search ads.
2. Value - Next you refine this focus within your target groups, using bids and match types and keyword negatives to properly value the different people who you want to attract to your website or landing pages.
3. Satisfy - With clearly targeted and properly valued searchers identified, the goal becomes delivering text ads, landing pages, and offers which satisfy user desires and advance them toward and through conversion.
4. Understand - Throughout this process we capture, analyze, and present meaningful and actionable information about each specific phase and the overall. Here you’ll apply improved reporting standards and metrics.

Each of these corresponds to specific tasks in the management of your paid search campaign, certain options that control your campaigns, and reports that provide metrics which guide the way or measure progress. (Watch future posts for details.)

Why the Change
The driving factor in moving to a High Resolution PPC approach is a desire for better returns on our investment of both time and money.

As with any other investment, we control risk by increasing the depth of our visibility and understanding, and then manipulating the options we have at our disposal.

With a High Resolution PPC approach, you regain control over your paid search campaigns, both in terms of having vastly better visibility into what is happening but also by understanding why specific results occur and how you can fix or improve them.

Next Time
In the next post on High Resolution PPC, I’ll dive a level or two deeper on the target-value-satisfy-understand process. This mental shift is the cornerstone, and once you start thinking about this logical flow in your paid search marketing, it becomes a lot easier to use the options in the engines more strategically.

{If you’re at shop.org in Las Vegas this week, stop by and say hello – we’re in Booth 115.}

Two years ago we took a deep soul-searching look at paid search management practices and technology and decided both were inadequate.

Since then we’ve developed completely new management practices and technology, and it’s time to roll them both out publicly.

The management practices are built around a framework called ‘High Resolution PPC‘. It’s based on the idea that there are three distinct stages in the paid search process and specific steps and checks to sequentially create a well formed and effective campaign.

The technology is our ClickEquations platform, and was developed based on the idea that paid search is not as efficient and effective as it could be because the software tools we have had are inadequate in a number of very specific ways.

Background
We’ve been professionally managing paid search accounts for about five years. As the market and engine platforms have developed, the size and complexity of the accounts managed has grown. Working with both venture-backed startups and Fortune 100 companies we live with high expectations, competitive sensitivities, and serious budget and ROI oversight.

While it’s been exciting to go along for the ride as the market exploded and the technology evolved, anyone who’s lived deeply in paid search management over the past years knows the day-to-day hasn’t been exactly a picnic.

It’s a lot closer to a horror show.

The search engines are opaque (to put it kindly) on multiple layers. If you try to actually figure out what’s happening and why, you find key information is missing, available information is contradictory, and things aren’t exactly consistent. The Matching Algorithms used by the Search Engines and their rules change constantly.

The image of easy-management and easy-money that caught the media’s attention in the early years is ingrained in the imaginations of VPs of Marketing, Merchandising Managers, and even some Directors of eCommerce. Which means they have expectations and make requests that make the PPC Manager’s head spin – on a daily basis.

But most importantly, the amount of change that the industry has gone through over these short, jam-packed years has not been kept up with by either the ‘best practices’ or the ‘delivered technology’.

Paid search management is a young profession, one in which everyone has been learning on the job, sharing info via the web, and attending  those endless conferences, but past a very small number of truly universal tactics there is no agreed upon ‘right way’ to organize and manage paid search, in even the most general sense.

That’s no way to spend $9 Billion or $10 Billion.

And the software tools haven’t fared will in this rapid-change environment either. The engines built interfaces that primarily serve their own needs. Instead of thinking about how paid search managers actually should and do work, and building tools to facilitate this effort, the tools are organized around the needs of the engines and their algorithms.

This leaves search managers often facing screens with 5 open applications, each which has one piece of the data or one tool they want, none designed for the whole job. In this environment work flow requires on a lot of application and context switching, cutting and pasting, and mental contortions supported by the acceptance of silly limitations and obvious inaccuracies.

We think it’s time for both the process and technology of PPC to catch up with the market realities and demands.

Introducing High Resolution PPC & ClickEquations
In the next few posts I’ll formally introduce both High Resolution PPC and ClickEquations.

High Resolution PPC starts with three primary goals – targeting the right prospects, assigning an accurate value to each, and then satisfying them. It provides the context for using the available paid search controls and options with clear ways to measure results and priorize work.

ClickEquations was and is being developed with three primary goals as well – delivering clear and accurate data, helping to prioritize opportunities and tasks, and automating as many PPC process steps as possible.

We’re excited to share the results of the last few years of work, and are eager to get your feedback.

After the upcoming introductory posts, I’ll deep dive into the specific components of each over the coming weeks and months.

• Another development Sprint done – app features and functions complete. More ‘Charter Clients’ go live next week. Great job dev team! #
• In sprint review-the details of what was done over last three weeks being presented. #
• New sprint starts tomorrow, with good old fashioned heated debate over what features get in next. Reviewing amazing list tonight. Can’t wait #
• TheInsideAngle blog posts a review and comments on ClickEquations. COOL! http://bit.ly/44LLPD #
• Several great demos today with advanced ppc managers. Cool ideas from them on custom excel templates based on truemetrics. #
• Long call today about revenue attribution. Man that is a messy and confusing topic. #

We held some blogger-only previews this week, and Andrey from theinsideangle has posted some thoughts after seeing ClickEquations.

The post is comprehensive, and here’s our favorite part:

From what I was able to see, the tool provides three traits that are very important to a search marketer.

1. First, and most importantly, it tracks everything to a keyword level. There are many PPC management and analytics tools that don’t have this level of reporting so this is always the first feature I look for when analyzing any type of PPC software.
   
2. Secondly, it’s fast.  During the presentation, Craig said that ClickEquations was pulling the data from their servers and the load times for each report seemed to be very quick. There is lots of data that needs to be pulled when running different reports for paid search campaigns that can be very labor intensive on the servers. Having software that is programmed to create custom reports and aggregate the data in a fast and efficient way is a big plus.
   
3. Third is the detail. ClickEquations is able to provide very detailed data and Commerce360 has taken the time to add in other features that can be useful such as additional metrics, custom reporting and other features that make it, from an initial viewpoint, look better and more advanced than other PPC tools.

The tool also has some other added benefits such as professional looking reports, extensive integration with Excel (this is a big plus too) and an easy to use web interface. The interaction between Excel and the database looks like an analysts dream come true. The software allows you to quickly grab different sets of data into a custom report and quickly updates data as you change filters.

I could see this feature quickly becoming one of my favorites if I were to use the tool.

Thanks Andrey!

If you want to see for yourself, you have three easy options:

• Stop by our booth (115) at Shop.org in Las Vegas next week.
• Sign up for an Invitation to set up a free charter account.
• Watch this space for upcoming public webinar demos.

NOTE: If you’re a blogger and would like demo or a review account, contact me and we’ll set you up.

ClickEquations gets a real public preview next week in Las Vegas. We’ve got a booth at the Annual Shop.org Summit. We’re in booth #115 just inside the front door at Mandalay Bay.

The show floor is open Monday evening the 15th, and all day Tues and Weds (16th-17th).

We’ll be there doing demo’s of ClickEquations and you’ll see large crowds gathered around for our innovative ‘boothinars’.

If you’ll be there, stop by and say hello – you can even sign up to request a ClickEquations Charter Account right on the spot.

• First pics of new Adwords Quality Score Screens – http://tinyurl.com/6ys3pf Still visible scores! #
• Yesterday’s Webmaster Radio Interview is live: http://tinyurl.com/6kx65p Discussion of better SEM Analytics + the launch of ClickEquations #
• One of the insiders comments publicly on ClickEquations: http://bit.ly/1L8HWp Thoughts from a PPC Pro, Quality Junkie, and Pop-Culture Guru. #
• Deciding how to tackle the hard questions of Revenue Attribution. Lots of answers to the question: “How much revenue from that keyword?” #