ClickEquations Blog

A recent interview I did with Chris Crum of WebProNews is now live. It’s all about Match Types, give it a look.

For more on how Match Types work and the best way to take advantage of them (including our nearly-famous ‘Match Type Keyword Trap’), download out our Match Type White Paper from the new ClickEquations Learning Center.

You need killer paid search management software. We want more twitter followers. Maybe we can help each other.

To be eligible to win, sign up to follow @ClickEquations on Twitter by March 15, 2009.

We’ll select one lucky follower who’ll win free use of ClickEquations for 12 months – for PPC spend up to $1MM per-month -  a retail value of $240,000!

Semi-complete Terms and Conditions listed below.

The selection will be made at random and winner tweeted promptly.

Paid search advertiser or agency? Follow @clickequations and win!

PS: Even if you don’t ‘win, we give great tweet.

The Details
To be eligible you must be a twitter ‘follower’ of @clickequations by 12:00pm EST 3/15/2009. Current followers will be included in the drawing. The selection will be made at random using a method we haven’t figured out yet. The winner will be announced via Twitter by 3/18/2009.

Winner will recieve a 12-month license to the ClickEquations Paid Search Platform, for use by their company (one account on Google, Yahoo, & MSN) with up to $1M per month in aggregate PPC spend. The license may not be sold, assigned, or transferred except; if the winner is a paid search agency they may assign the license to one of their accounts (but not charge account for it). This and all other terms and conditions subject to the sole descretion of Commerce360 Inc.

Our February Release introduced new campaign editing features, so in this post we’ll take a close look at these capabilities.

These features appear under the new Manager tab, and so we felt compelled to call the editor ClickEquations Manager.

Simply described, it’s an ‘Adwords Editor like’ way to manipulate your Google, Yahoo, and MSN campaigns.

Like AE it’s based on a three-pane design, with left-side navigation, right side data display, and an ‘editing tray’ at the bottom of the screen.

(Click Image To Enlarge)

Navigation
There are three ways to navigate your accounts:

1. Hierarchical Controller. Use the hierarchical controller to select any engine, campaign, or ad group. You can instantly switch back and forth to any location in your accounts.
2. Click-Dive the lists. Select an engine and get a list of campaigns, click a campaign name to see the ad groups, click any ad group to see it’s keywords and text-ads.
3. Breadcrumb Navigator. You can use the breadcrumbs to navigate back, click the [+] signs to see a pull down of all options, or the > to dive another level deeper.

Data Display
At each level (Engine, Campaign, Ad Group) the display area presents a list items and the related data fields. You can sort and re-arrange the fields freely.

You can also use the filter option to select only those items that meet any specific criteria.

Icons above the items make it easy to pause, resume, edit, or add items. Both edit and add open the editing tray at the bottom of the screen.

Editing Tray
The editing tray presents all available fields for whatever element you’ve selected. You can then enter or modify these fields, and use the Save button to submit changes to the selected engine in real time.

A pop-up message will confirm that changes have been accepted by the selected search engine and are now live in your account.

Manager Benefits
Full three-engine editing is a core requirement and basic feature of any paid search management tool. The ClickEquations Manager makes it fast and easy to update or expand your campaigns.

In ClickEquations it lives along side of our rich reporting interface, powerful bid management, and ClickEquations Analyst Excel Plug-in -- each of which we’ll feature in a future post in this series.

Of course, the best way to really understand the benefits is to try it for yourself -- sign up for a free 30 day trial of ClickEquations today.

ClickEquations February ’09 -- Features Video

• RT @dannysullivan: wow. twitter was second largest referring source to search engine land yesterday just behind google. wow. #
• Dave Marsh plays live Van Morrison and reads vintage Lester Bangs. Best Sirius music yet. #
• New Post from @SEMOE http://bit.ly/sFCtY on advantages of multi-account editing in ClickEquations 
• My SMX ‘Life With #Adwords Quality Score’ preso now via YouTube http://bit.ly/DghVA. Includes some cool QS distribution graphs #
• Retweeting @thelostagency: “Dear Avinash”: Bounces, Abandonment, Visitor Ratios & Data Drops! http://urlzen.com/6dd #
• ClickEquations – February Release Webinar today 1pm EST – All Welcome – http://bit.ly/PVNqG See new management tool and bidding features #
• We’re on tour in Boston today. #
• http://twitpic.com/1jyx2 – Mob movie festival at Italian restaurant in Boston. #
• Training Webinar on New ClickEquations editing and bidding features today 1pm EST for all clients and trial customers. http://bit.ly/foRV9 #
• RT @szetela: Black hat tactics http://is.gd/jXzN (David’s not suggesting these…) #
• DeTweeting: @modetwo:  Tip4: Maintain a “trial” adwords acct and a “best of breed” adwords acct for high CTR adgroups/kws. QS Will Soar. #
• Introducing the DeTweet (DT) http://bit.ly/JmLYO #
• Retweeting @giovanni: Guy Kawasaki “Twitter is 140 Characters of junk mail” (Sometimes, Hence the DeTweet http://bit.ly/JmLYO) #

Get our Tweets in real time – Follow us @ClickEquations

Like many others, we’ve jumped into twitter-nation with both feet over the last few months. The simple efficiency and surprising range of benefits to both writing and reading have impressed us.

But there are limitations and problems too.

Some of these make me question the long term viability of the model – if I had to bet I’d say the system crashes under the weight of its own success (and the various forms of abuse by its users) in the not too distant future. But we’ll see.

One of the cool and useful twitterisms is the Re-Tweet. It’s a way to pass along something cool or interesting to your own circle of followers. Re-tweeting is an affirmation.

But what about tweets you disagree with? Not things you’re neutral about, but information that you think is actually lowering our collective knowledge or IQ.

Shouldn’t there be a way to tell the world ‘I don’t think think this is right.’?

Particularly in a somewhat technical discipline like paid search (#ppc) it pains me to see things flying by, spreading across the twitt-o-sphere and into the information starved eyes of young trusting paid search practitioners, that just ain’t true. Or aren’t exactly right. Or could be easily mis-understood. You get the idea.

Reading one this morning gave me the idea for the De-Tweet.

With the 140 character limit there is no room to both reference the original tweet and make the counter-point.

So I’m going to just De-Tweet it in the same way people Re-Tweet stuff.

I hope to start a trend.

The DeTweet Defined:

DeTweet (AKA: De-Tweet or DT) = Passing along the tweet of another with some degree of disapproval. It can range from strong (that’s a lie) to mild (there are exceptions or conditions). It shouldn’t be taken as impolite or unfriendly – it’s done in the spirit of twitterville – as a new way to participate in the conversation. Of course elaboration and counter arguments can be made in follow on tweets or blog posts.

But at least you don’t have to sit idly by and just wince anymore.

Or at least I don’t.

What do you think?

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(Looking for a paid search tweeter you can retweet and/or detweet? Follow us @clickequations.)

Webmaster Radio stopped by the ClickEquations booth to talk with Craig Danuloff about the February 09 ClickEquations Release.  Check it out!

At SMX last week I also participated on a great panel called Up Close With Google AdWords Quality Score.

Panelist this time were Addie Conner (Director of Search Marketing, Course Advisor Inc.) and Nicholas Fox (Business Product Management Director, AdWords, Google Inc.). Our moderator again was Matt Van Wagner (President, Find Me Faster)

Nick from Google presented first, and I must say made me a little nervous.

After all, most Google Quality Score information is less than well documented, and my fear was that Nick (having the advantage of actual knowledge and facts) would say and show things that proved my own pending presentation less than accurate.

His presentation was very good and informative, both confirming and shedding additional light on what we know about Quality Score. (And thankfully, not contradicting my slides! Whew.)

A few of Nick’s points I found particularly interesting:

• Nick confirmed that Quality Score is primarily CTR driven. He used a ‘wisdom of the crowds’ analogy to say that people vote with their clicks and overall they tell Google if an ad and landing page are appropriate for a given keyword.
• He also explained that landing page problems -- like a page full of adwords ads or promises of ‘free’ items that aren’t really free -- do result in extremely low quality score regardless of CTR. And that these pages or ads aren’t banned, but would have to bid extremely high to overcome their quality score and be shown.
• In what I thought was a revealing organization on a slide, he showed that good made four separate decisions about an ad: showing, rank, top (vs left) and price. I’ll write more on this later but the idea that these were separate decisions and not rolled into one process surprised me.

Addie played a Truth/Myth game with the audience, having handed out voting signs earlier. Her questions were deep, and she clearly has made a deep study of the subject. I’m not sure anyone in the audience got 100% correct.

My presentation included:

• An overview of the role Quality Score plays for search advertisers
• A summary of how Impression Share lets you see the cost of poor Quality Score
• Some statistical analysis of Quality Score we’ve done using ClickEquations Analyst

This 10-minute presentation is now available via YouTube:

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More on Quality Score:

• In-Depth on Google Quality Score (blog post series)
• Google Quality Score Webinar (with Bryan Eisenberg)

Last week at SMX in San Jose I participated on a panel called Writing Killer PPC Ad Copy -- with Shane Snow and David Szetela, with Matt Van Wagner as our moderator.

Shane gave a great presentation on creative approaches to writing ad copy, and David shared his broad knowledge including a focus on how ads and ad copy needs to be different on the content network.

I focused on three aspects of success with text ads:

1. Organize campaigns so the ads are seen by the right people.
2. Develop recipes for your ad copy to help you test for different triggers.
3. Conduct formal tests to find dramatic CTR improvements.

Improvements in text ad performance -- meaning higher click-through-rates -are within reach of every paid search advertisers. With a simple approach and a little effort, you can drive up CTR by 2x-4x or more, which brings a lot of advantages:

• Higher Quality Score
• Lower Cost-Per-Click
• Better Impression Share
• Higher Positions

Hopefully this 10-minute presentation will provide some insights, and inspire you to spend some time improving your text ads:

• Interesting thoughts about Google Latitude and the #PPC connection. http://bit.ly/QmnH
• Again seeing #Adwords campaigns on ‘Rotate: show ads evenly’ which are instead driving vast majority of impressions to 1 or 2 ads. Just me?
• ClickEquations New Release http://bit.ly/b6H6 – Full editor, strong bid management + our killer data and reporting. See @ SMX
• Yet another review of how to handle wierd revenue allocation cases. #
• Heading out to SMX. Say hello if there: CQ Booth, Floor theater Tues., Ad-Text panel Weds. Drunk PPCRS Wed PM, Quality Score panel Thurs.
• Twitter Followers Only SMX Special – Visit our booth for a ClickEquations t-shirt. Just ask at booth – give codeword ‘tweet’. Limited Supply
• Video of new February ClickEquations release now on YouTube: http://bit.ly/2Ujp2f See new editor, bid automation, more
• Checking out a Kenshoo presentation. At SMX.
• I love it when competitors customers want to buy ClickEquations too because our reporting is so much better. Happened repeatedly here at SMX
• Today’s SMX Panel – Writing Killer Ad Copy – 3pm PST. But I’m going to talk about the role of text-ads a lot, a little about text ad testing
• RT @erictpeterson: Do you have a campaign attribution problem? Join @johnlovett and I at 10 AM Pacific to learn more. http://bit.ly/g3WI
• Can thirteen PPC geeks do a radio show at once? Doubtful but we’ll try 
• Retweeting @TheGrok: Free Pre-recorded High Resolution PPC Webinar http://tinyurl.com/bc58jt
• Starting quality score panel at SMX. Google QS product manager up first. 
• Killer Quality Score presentation by Addie Conner @ #SMX. Get the bootleg somewhere. Will try to get/post on blog.
• Q&A from QS Panel: Why no ads on KW ‘Elephant’? Low CTR on ads produces too low a QS, so no ads show. 
• New ‘High Resolution PPC’ webinar – http://bit.ly/pwSGc – My new framework for managing PPC and preview of upcoming ebook.
• Attendee Notes from two of the panels I was on at SMX. Quality Score: http://bit.ly/JNel0 and Killer Ad http://bit.ly/aItqH
• RT @Szetela: Drunken PPC Rockstars Roundtable recording here: http://bit.ly/DFW1s (Warning: Drink BEFORE listening)
• See the new ClickEquations release: Webinar Tuesday 17th 1pm EST http://bit.ly/FlBs3 – - Reserve Your Space Now

Get our Twitter updates in real time – Follow us @clickequations