ClickEquations Blog

Congratulations to our CEO Lucinda Holt, who is being honored tonight as the 2008 Iris Newman Award winner at the Women Inventing Next (WIN) Annual Celebration at Rittenhouse Hotel in Philadelphia.

The award specifically recognizes Lucinda for her commitment to helping advance women entrepreneurs. WIN is the Greater Philadelphia region’s only organization specifically for women who are leaders of and investors in high-growth businesses.

Lucinda is a serial CEO who has built and run a number successful high tech startups, a previous winner of the Eastern Technology Council’s Enterprise Award for CEO of the Year, and Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in Philadelphia.

It’s a tad early for year-end predictions, but I’ll make one anyway. 2009 will be the year search queries overtake ‘keywords’ as the focal point of interest among PPC managers.

Search queries, by way of definition, are the words and phrases user type into the search box before clicking the ‘Search’ button. They’re often and confusingly called ‘keywords, both in organic search and even within PPC.

In the paid search world we should pay close attention to search queries and the way they’re matched with the keywords we bid on – to determine how we can tune or keyword buys, match types, bids, text-ads, and landing pages.

Most paid search manager don’t have full access to every query for every click they pay for. Yahoo and MSN don’t provide them and Google Adwords provides only a very partial list and not matched at the keyword level.

Providing clear, complete, and detailed search query information is one of the great features in our ClickEquations paid search platform, and a few others provide query access as well.

Recently we’ve talked to a number of advertisers who’ve been mining queries to move to a much higher percentage of exact match keyword buys – a practice we’ve found to increase volumes and lower costs.

And this week Google introduced a new keyword expansion tool which can provide you with lists of actual search queries related to your keywords and your landing pages.

This is a great help. Both as a research tool, as additional insight into the algorithms google uses to contextually relate words and pages, and to get more people to think about the distinction between queries and keywords.

If you find the new Google Search-Based Keyword Tool useful, imagine how great it would be to see nearly every query for every click you’re paying for in your current search campaigns.

• Taking ClickEquations to Dallas today. #
• New report to bulid today in CQ Analyst – LoserCount – a simple dashboard shown # and % of money losing kw’s, Adgroups, Campaigns. #

Suppose you had to quickly reduce your PPC spend. Where would you cut?

One very helpful analysis is rank your campaigns (or better yet AdGroups) by ROI. This tells you where you’re getting more return-per-dollar, and where you’re getting less.

To simplify this analysis we built a ClickEquations Analyst Report, which runs in Microsoft Excel. To use it you define three thresholds – a high ROI that you desire, a low ROI that you detest, and a medium ROI that is minimally acceptable.

With a single mouse click you can then find out what number of your campaigns and what percentage of your spend and revenue fall into each of these bands. On the next tab in the worksheet you can find out exactly which campaigns fell into each group.

In the example above, we look at how ROI falls into four clusters and two charts visualize the spend and difference between spend and revenue.

Armed with this visual, most people are encouraged to look inside the campaigns – probably first by running the Ad-Group version of this report – and find ways to fix the losers or kill the problematic groups or keywords.

But you can’t drive to those actions and decisions without information. This report is a good example of how ClickEquations Analyst can help you to understand the performance of your accounts, and make good decisions about how to prioritize your PPC efforts.

You can begin your use of ClickEquations with a 30-day free trial. Sign up here.

Following my post last week on Quality Score, I was invited by Bryan Eisenberg to participate with him as part of his Always Be Testing Seminar Series on Tuesday, November 25, 2008 @ 12:00pm EST.

Bryan and I will present and discuss important information on how understanding and managing Quality Score can transform you paid search programs.

Details are reprinted below, or see the post at the GrokDotCom blog.

Google Quality Score
Exposing the Secret Factor to PPC Success

Bryan Eisenberg, Co-Founder & EVP at FutureNow, and Craig Danuloff, Founder and President of Commerce360 Inc, a full service paid search management firm and developed the ClickEquations paid search software platform.

Quality Score is the PageRank of PPC. It’s a number Google assigns to your keywords which determines how much you have to bid, the position in which your ads appear, how often your ads are shown, and due to recent Adwords change it even determines if you can jump to the top of any search results page.

Understanding and managing Quality Score effects how you choose keywords, write text ads, and build landing pages. Knowing how your decisions impact Quality Score, and how Quality Score interacts with all the other controls you have in your accounts, can help you manage to greater PPC success

In this Webinar you’ll learn:

• exactly why the Quality Score in Adwords is so important,
• how Quality Score impacts the amount you spend and the amount you make from your PPC campaigns
• specific things you can do to drive the Quality Score higher for your keywords.

When: Tuesday, November 25, 2008 | 12:00pm EST

Where: Online, register here to receive your invitation

How much: It’s free, but space is limited so sign-up today!

• Playing with news “delta” functions in clickequations Analyst. Now easy to see what’s different that before. #
• Pondering the impact of organic search data in a PPC keyword-focused application. #
• The Long Tail In Music is mostly dragging on the floor. http://bit.ly/b3tk And they don’t have to contend with ‘broad match’. #
• In Search there is a long tail – so says Hitwise http://bit.ly/BA0d. How do you manage the head vs mid vs tail in your #ppc campaigns? #

How is ClickEquations different than other paid search / bid management tools?

That’s a question we’ve been getting a lot since our recent introduction.

Here’s a quick list of ten capabilities we think set us apart.

1) Search Queries
ClickEquations captures and displays the actual query each user types, matched with the keyword it triggered and the match type of that keyword. I’ve written about the importance of seeing search queries extensively in the past, as without them it’s nearly impossible to accurately tune your keywords, match types, and bids.

Google Adwords itself provides only keywords at the ad-group level (you can’t see each matched against a specific keyword) which eliminates a lot of the benefit of this important data. Adwords also shows a much smaller percentage of the queries – a lot get lost in the ‘Other Unique Query’ count. I just checked one of our active ad-groups for the last 7 days, and Google only provided 33% of the queries while ClickEquations provided 80% of them.

2) Item-Level Conversion Details
ClickEquations captures item-level conversion data. It’s not enough to know you made a sale. You need to know you sold three blue shirts and a green hat. Or had a newsletter sign-up and four downloads.

Google and Yahoo Conversion tracking, and other simpler conversion trackers don’t provide this ‘SKU level’ detail.

3) Net Profit/ROI Calculation
ClickEquations enables net profit and true ROI to be calculated based on the margin (or value) of each conversion event, and displayed for each campaign, adgroup, and keyword.

Neither Adwords nor Yahoo, MSN, or even Google Analytics enable you to define margins to calculate real profit or returns.

4) Google Impression Share
ClickEquations displays Google Impression Share as an integrated metric in our Campaign reports. This important metric isn’t visible in Adwords Campaign Management or in any other PPC management tool. If you want to grow your campaigns, regularly monitoring your IS is critical.

5) TrueMetrics
ClickEquations delivers proprietary value-add metrics that provide important insights into your campaigns and ad-groups. These include our ClickShare metric which shows opportunity in AdGroups and Keywords, and ClickVariance which tells you when keywords are improperly grouped.

6) Performance
ClickEquations is fast. There was no gripe larger or inefficiency as great for us using other tools or working across three engine interfaces than extremely slow redraws and cumbersome interfaces.

In ClickEquations reports render in literally a few seconds, and account navigation and filtering are always at your fingertips.

7) Report Customization
ClickEquations allows you to see what you want to see how you want to see it. It starts with over 40 default reports many of which are tailored to specific tasks paid search managers perform many times each day, and each one can be customized and saved to display the data and sort orders you find most efficient.

8 ) Audit Reports
ClickEquations provides special detailed reports to help answer the common question – how come that report doesn’t align with this one? When you need to verify data between analytics and paid search, or with your backend systems, our rich audit reports help pin-point exactly which clicks and conversions are tracking properly.

9) Multi-Account Ready
ClickEquations supports agencies or large advertisers with multiple search accounts per engine. Just click to switch between accounts, and create powerful roll-up reports and dashboards.

10) ClickEquations Analyst within Microsoft Excel
ClickEquations provides live data feeds right into Excel 2003 or 2007 – with anytime one-button data refresh. This powerful plug-in supports our pre-defined reports and dashboards, lets you build your own from scratch, and can even be shared with other ClickEquations users.

Want to learn more? Attend one of our upcoming webinars, or get yourself a free 30-day trial.

Google is again modifying both the calculation and impact of their ‘Quality Score’ metric. As with most Google changes, the stated goal is improving search quality and user experience. The coincidental result is that Google will make more money.

There are two changes this time:

• Quality score will now be ‘position adjusted’ to take into account the location of the text-ad when the click-through occurs. This makes it ‘more accurate’. Makes me wonder why this didn’t happen a long time ago. This increases the value of extensive text-ad testing.
• Quality score can now cause an ad to move above another ad it would normally rank below IF this jump pushes the ad to the top of the page (rather than the right edge). (That’s a bad quick summary, read the Google announce for the details.)

You can read some worthwhile thoughts here and here and here or here or here.

Beyond these details what strikes me is how important quality score has become to paid search management and results.

Quality score drives bid requirements, quality score drives ad position, quality score drives impression share, and now quality score drives the chance to leapfrog your way to the top center of search result pages.

What Do We Know About Quality Score?

Although quality score plays a central role in how your money is spent and made in Google Adwords, it is officially a ‘secret formula’.

Like PageRank on the SEO side, Google makes only vague pronouncements while pundits and practitioners share theories and recommendation endlessly – but nobody can tell you definitively how to maximize your quality score.

It still isn’t even that easy to see your quality score, although it is getting easier. Google recently changed the way they display quality score – giving it an integer value – but it’s still under a ‘work for it’ pop-up in the Adwords interface. On the positive front, they have finally added quality score to the API (thank you!) so third-party tools can begin to make use of it.

But also like PageRank the scores tend to clump around certain values, and the distinctions between close numbers aren’t obvious.

Also, and this is just a hunch, I’d bet nearly anything Google doesn’t maintain or use the number as an integer. So two keywords from two different bidders that both show a QS of ’7′ might in fact be one with a 7.0001 and another with a 7.9998.

Four Conclusions

1. Google has an awesome business. They sell a product with secret specifications which are subject to change, and charge whatever they want without even telling anyone why or how. Nobody but the Mafia selling protection services to local merchants ever got away with this before.
2. Advertisers have to really play the ‘chase the quality score ghost’ game. Obsess about CTR’s and align as many of the other known factors as possible. Live with the fact that you’ll waste time trying to please the QS algorithm because there’s no published list for how to get into quality-score-heaven.
3. Advertisers should continue to clammor for more openness from Google as to what counts, how much, when, and how we’re charged accordingly. Neither #1 or #2 should be true.
4. I need to spend a lot more time thinking and writing about Quality Score. It’s a big deal.

• Join us for ClickEquations Webinar, demo, with Q&A Tuesday 1pm EST – http://bit.ly/3owBUB #
• Just saw the tv-news crawl used for contextual advertising. Selling ‘commemorative’ bats during the Phillies Parade. Bet this use grows. #
• Imagine if Google bought the crawl on tv shows and sold the space on pay-per-call or click-to-URL. Suck to watch, but more inventory! #