ClickEquations Blog

• Is it possible that only 50% of paid search marketers know about Google’s Impression Share? After a few weeks at trade shows, I think so. #
• #ericpeterson – thanks for stopping by for a clickequations demo. glad I didn’t stand you up this time! #
• Question at Emetrics: Can you modify ClickShare to account for high organic rankings on keywords? Answer: No, but great idea! #
• Gary Angel notes difference between tail length and width – more specific vs tangential terms. #
• Interesting stat from traffic.com showing CTR impacting CPC with daily volatility. Wouldn’t have expected quick up/down reactions #
• Mike Grehan #emetrics can go over the basics of search with his deep knowledge and enough true insights to make it compelling. #
• My #PPC Rockstars interview with David Szetela on ClickEquations and High Resolution PPC is live at Webmaster Radio http://bit.ly/4poM1p #
• Playing with new ability in ClickEquations to pull ‘delta’ reports on any field showing those with most/least change. idea: @avinashkaushik #
• Example: Show me the top 100 keywords that made me more money this week than last week. Or top 10 adgroup where my CPC grew the most. #

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by David Szetela from Clix Marketing for the PPC Rockstars radio show.

David and I discussed a range of ideas about paid search management and software, focusing on both High Resolution PPC and ClickEquations.

Webmaster Radio
	High Resolution PPC Show: PPC Rockstars

It’s about a 30 minute show you can listen to above or. listen at Webmaster radio.

Update: Sorry it wasn’t put up as fast as I thought, but it’s up now.

Each time someone executes a search, they’re asking a question.

They search because they want to learn about something. Or find out where something is. Or discover who has it or knows about it.

They may just be curious, or the question may have been provoked by some urgent problem.

The question could be simple or complex and the searcher might be sophisticated or incredibly naive.

Search Engines answer questions. That’s pretty much all they do.

Search results offer an ordered list of answers to the question the search engine thinks you’re asking.

Paid search advertising is your chance to raise your hand and let the searcher know that you think you have the answer to their question too.

In the next post we’ll discuss what it means to the organization of your campaigns to think of yourself as a professional answer provider.

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

This coming week, October 21-23, we’ll be in Washington DC at the Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit.

If you’ll be there, stop by for a ClickEquations demo, let us answer any questions you might have, or get setup for a free trial.

The exhibition hall is open Tues and Weds. To schedule a private discussion or demo time, just contact us at info@clickequations.com.

• Failed attempt to move website and blog off Dreamhost. Sites may be down if you try them – should be back soon and we’ll escape later. #
• On a better note, playing with way out of the box ideas about visualizing and navigating the components of a PPC campaign. #
• What’s the best way to engage the entire emetrics audience in 2-minutes? Goal is to get them to visit the ClickEquations booth. Ideas? #
• I’m going to be on PPC Rockstars with David Szetela on Monday. http://bit.ly/1oJcLm Cool. #ppc #

A nice surprise from Google today, with the release of independent statistics for ad-group performance on the Google ‘Search Network’ – sites like AOL and Ask.com.

This is no doubt related to the Google-Yahoo deal and clammoring on this blog and elsewhere about the issues involved in integrating those reports. It’s great that reporting is now separate – next we need separate bidding options like they provide for the Content Network.

Interestingly, in one of our campaigns the search network bid is set to ‘auto’. I don’t know what that means. Are they going to auto-lower bids on search partners? Better than keeping them the same as bids on the Google network, but I’d still prefer advertiser control.

• If ‘Sarah’ is from Google, this is important insight into Quality Score – http://bit.ly/2i189q #ppc – Such as there are two of them. #
• Google Adwords Search Query Report Reveals exactly 2.51% of our queries over the last 4 days. That’s not a lot. #ppc #
• Should a search query totally unrelated to a Broad Match keyword buy be refundable? If you order soup, you can send back a mistaken salad. #
• First signed ClickEquations client is a whopper! At least we won’t have to quibble about whether we can handle large accounts/websites. #

This week was my first chance to attend an SMX show. Having seen SES mushroom into a massive show that invariably attracts a very diverse crowd, it was great to see that SMX really is a spin-off which attracts a more serious and experienced group of search marketers.

We talked to a lot of PPC Managers at the ClickEquations booth. Reactions were great, and hopefully many of them will be getting set up as part of our Charter Program over the next few weeks.

I also had a chance to speak with lots of the well-known in this world, including old friends like Bryan Eisenberg, our Advisor Avinash Kaushik (whom we also got to visit at Google NYC which was an intellectual and culinary treat), John Marshall from MarketMotive, and some people I hadn’t met before including Mike Grehan, and David Szetela from Clix Marketing.

The internet, as we all know, is the most trackable vehicle for marketing ever created. Everything that goes through these tubes can be perfectly tracked, traced, documented, and reported on.

Ya, right.

They never mention the two little requirements:

1. Every page must be properly tagged.
2. Every inbound/referring URL must be properly tagged.

(In the broader sense there is of course a third issue – I’m leaving aside for now the vast weaknesses of cookies and the role they play in online tracking/accuracy.)

Why Is Tagging So Hard?

By which I mean to ask two questions:

• Why do people find it so hard to add tags? The requirement (in the simplest cases) is to accurately cut-and-paste. (Yes there are more complex cases where parameters have to be passed, for now let’s leave those aside.) Yet in enterprise environments we often see multi-month waiting times, panels and commissions and committees who need to approve them, and all forms of insanity as prerequisite to getting 316 characters in a single text-block added to the universal footer of a website, or 75 characters appended to a URL.
• Why do the environments make tagging so complex? This is the other side of the coin. Web pages and URLs need tags. This may have been a requirement not foreseen in the mid ’90′s when core web technology was developed, but it has one for many years now. Yet neither web servers nor CMS systems nor email managers nor Google/Yahoo themselves have made tagging anywhere near as simple as they could.

Tagging – A System Requirement

While I’ll fully admit to having no understanding or appreciation for ‘IT Depts’ who can’t figure out how to allocate time to update page tags (and testing them thoroughly) on at worst a weekly or monthly basis, the more I think about this problem the more I think the root of the problem is in the technology layer itself.

Software that builds or serves web pages should have the ability to conditionally add ‘tracking pixels’ or ‘code snippets’ or ‘page tags’ or whatever you want to call them to each page, and provide a single management interface for controlling these included codes, defining the conditions on which they’re embedded, and even to make the parameter passing necessary in the most complicated cases, easier.

Software that creates or delivers URLs should similarly have the ability to simply and centrally administer the appending of tracking codes to those URLs.

In Adwords, for example, there should be Account, Campaign, and Ad-Group level parameters for tracking codes you want appended to every target URL. Why should it be necessary to manually insert them (150,000 times) at the ad-group or keyword level?

Let’s face it, they’re universal 99.9% of the time. Didn’t they teach me in High School that computers simplify repetitive tasks?

And Verify Please

On both sides – the site and the URL – these systems should validate and report on the presence and contents of these codes after they’re served.

Sometimes it seems like 25% of the man-hours of the entire online marketing industry is spent find those situations where pages or URLs were missing tags. And almost certainly a percentage of all our reports are incorrect based on places where these tags are missing and nobody detects it.

This Rant Sponsored By

As a marketing and paid search agency we’ve had our fair share of (which is to say more than humanly endurable) issues related to getting tracking pixels on client websites and managing the tracking codes that need to be placed into emails, affiliate promotions, and paid search ads.

Very often weeks or months of reporting was ruined, never to be corrected, by pending or incorrect tracking code issues. I know this is typical and true in online marketing deptments everywhere.

As we’re rolling out ClickEquations we’re now living through another aspect of this problem.

Clients and prospects that want to take full advantage of our system and use our ClickEquations tags, but they just can’t get their organizations or vendors to support them – at least in reasonable time frames. Or there’s a problem dealing with the complexity and delay involved in having all target URLs updated in the engines (although this can at least be automated via the APIs).

We’re working on ways to make tagging easier for our clients, but the universality of the problem suggests that it really needs to be solved down a few layers in the infrastructure.

I think it’s time the amount of pain and trouble this problem is causing got more organized visibility, so the creators of those lower level systems could start feeling the pressure to add the kind of tagging support we all need.

How have tagging problems or complexities impacted your online marketing reporting? How can we fix or improve this situation?

Will you be at SMX in New York this week? Stop by as see ClickEquations in the Exhibit Area.