ClickEquations Blog

Join us at two upcoming conference shows. Stop by the booth to ask your pressing paid search questions and see a demo of ClickEquations. Use the codes below to get exclusive discounts on registration.

• OMMA Global New York
  OMMA Global New York is the premiere online media, marketing, and advertising expo spanning two days of serious talks and discussions from the very best in the industry.
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  ClickEquations is the exclusive sponsor of OMMA Search, the series of pannels during OMMA Global. We’ll also be answering questions and doing demos in the expo hall. Stop by booth 314.
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  Use the code OMMAGCEDISC to get a discount on registration. Register here.
  • September 21-22, 2009
  • New York Marriott Marquis
    1535 Broadway
    New York, New York 10036
    Telephone 212-398-1900

• Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East
  SMX East attracts the best and brightest in the search community. It’s programmed by Danny Sullivan and the team at Search Engine Land. You’ll learn all things search marketing and have fun at great networking parties.
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  Use the discount code smx10clickequations when you register for the conference
  • October 5-7, 2009
  • Jacob K. Javits Convention Center
    655 West 34th Street
    New York, NY 10001

Proving that the future will be ever-more interesting, Google has recently been testing AdWords text-ads with ‘site-links’. These are multiple hyper-links to different landing pages within the advertisers’ web site.

Click To Enlarge

Site-Links have existed in organic listings for popular and high ranking sites for some time. According to Google their appearance in AdWords is just ‘yet another test’:

As part of our ongoing commitment to help users find the information they’re looking for online, we are testing a feature in which links to various pages of an advertiser’s website may appear within the text ads on Google.com. Presenting multiple landing page options is intended to make specific website information such as gift registries, special deals, store locators and the like more easily accessible to users. It also offers brand marketers a new way to quickly engage potential customers. This feature is currently in a limited beta with a small number of advertisers.

It’s an interesting idea, which we could imagine helping some Broad Match keywords quite a bit. On the other hand, imagine having to test different link combinations within each ad, and trying to track the various conversion rates on each of the landing pages. Or maybe Google will automatically select the appropriate pages based on the search query of the user?

Tests like this often come and go and are never heard from again. It will be interesting to see what happens with this one.

Hat Tip to SEO-RoundTable and Darrin Ward who originally discovered this test.

The fifth ClickEquations report featured in Avinash Kaushik’s recent blog post concerned the ability of ClickEquations to show actual search queries matched to each keyword.

This is a feature of the core ClickEquations reporting screen, and shows all queries from all search engines by keyword and match type.

There is a related ClickEquations Analyst Report that makes use of this data in a very powerful way.

It’s called the ‘Unique Queries Per Keyword’ report. It counts the number of different queries that the search engines are matching to each of your keywords, and presents them sorted by the number of queries.

On the list above for example, the keyword ‘dog remedy’ in Broad Match was matched by Google to 528 different search queries. Yowsa!

If a keyword is being matched to over 500 different search queries, two things are almost certainly true:

• There are some pretty unrelated search queries in there that have to be avoided with negatives
• There are dozens of new phrase and exact match keywords that need to be added to better attack these queries.

This of course is how we generally use the search query report, but with this prioritized view we can quickly find the keywords where keyword negatives and expansion is critically needed. Every negative we add saves us money. Every keyword we add in this way has multiple benefit, especially those using phrase and exact match types. Each can be expected to:

• Increase our Impression Share by expand the pool of queries to which we’ll be matched
• Improve Quality Score by by increasing relevance and increasing number of times query exactly matches keyword
• Enables us to bid to the value of each keyword rather than once for whole broad group
• If we do get increased Quality Score on specific Keywords, our CPC could/should be lower on those queries.

In summary, there are lots of advantages to a more detailed keyword build-out when it’s driven by actual queries not random speculation.

Finding Keyword Expansion Ideas
To find out which keywords we need to add to both our keyword and negative lists, we can jump back into the ClickEquations application and find all the queries that Google matched to ‘dog remedy’.

Likely negatives would be words for illnesses that we don’t sell product for – dysplasia, pancreatitis, rabies, etc. Areas for expansion are those which come up a lot – mange, itching, and vomiting seam like winners in this area – to name a few.

Highly specific words clarify intent – which gets a lot of press in the ‘long tail’ discussion of keyword expansion. The same is true on the negative side: highly specific words can verify incompatible intent.

Bulk Importing Keywords and Negatives
Since it looks like we may want to add a lot of new keywords and negatives, we can jump back into ClickEquations Analyst and pull the full query list into Excel, make a few edits, and then bulk import that edited list back into ClickEquations.

Squash The Broad Match
Our Match Type Keyword Trap white paper discusses how you should use match types to take control of your search queries back from the search engines.

Using the capabilities described above to quickly find the keywords where broad match (and to a lessor degree phrase match) is running out-of-control is a great first step towards taking back control, saving yourself some money, and expanding the reach of your account.

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We’ve created a ClickEquations page on Facebook, as another way to keep in touch and share information about the paid search marketing and our ClickEquations software platform.

If you’re a paid search manager, ClickEquations user, future ClickEquations user, regular reader of this blog, or otherwise interested – we’d appreciate it if you’d sign up as a ‘Fan’ both to share your interest with the world and so that we have another way to keep in touch.

You can click the ‘Become A Fan’ button in the Facebook Fans widget in our right-hand sidebar, or search for ClickEquations on Facebook at become a fan there.

We’ve jetted across the country to exhibit at Search Engine Strategies San Jose. Stop by booth #721 in the expo hall to catch a demo or chat with the ClickEquations team, including President & Founder Craig Danuloff.

We’ll also be at SearchBash on Tuesday and the Internet Marketers Charity Party on Wednesday. Check @clickequations on Twitter for the latest updates.

When we added the bulk editing features to ClickEquations earlier this year, we included a simple ‘export’ button at the ad group level. With it you could export all the keywords in a single ad group as a .CSV file which you could then open and edit in Excel. This made it easy to change a bunch of bids, assign mass bid-rules, or add new keywords, etc.

We soon heard from customers that you wanted to do more – export all keywords in a campaign or even from all campaigns in a single search engine account.

In our July release we added this capability – now which you choose the ‘export’ button you’ll get a dialog box asking if you want just the keywords from the current ad group, or all the keywords from the current campaign or search engine account.

For now, you have to dive into one ad group to find the ‘export’ button. Next release we’ll move the button up to appear at the campaign and engine levels too.

After you’ve done your bulk editing in excel, save the file back out as .CSV or Excel 2003 format, and then you can import it back into ClickEquations. The bulk import dialog box accepts keywords from any number of campaigns and ad groups within a single file.

The third ClickEquations Analyst report featured in Avinash Kaushik’s recent blog post is our ROI Distribution report, which enables you to analyze the performance of your campaigns and ad groups against high and low boundary conditions that you set. This helps you to know what percentage of your campaigns are achieving targets or falling below minimum goals.

To use the report, you first set your targets. In the ‘Target ROI’ box you can enter the return-on-investment goals you want to check. First enter your actual target in cell X17 (labeled ‘Great’) and then enter your minimum acceptable ROI in cell X18 (labeled ‘Poor’).

Of course, these are subjective targets, but the point is to establish boundaries and find out how different aspects of your campaign are performing relative to these boundaries. By entering a value which we would consider ‘great’ and another one we would consider ‘poor’ we can find out how different components of our compaign are performing relative to these two markers.

With your targets set, simply click the ‘Refresh All’ button in the ClickEquations Analyst Pallete. Note that this is perhaps the most complicated of our reports in terms of collecting and analyzing a lot of data – so this one takes a while. Actual time will depend upon the size of your campaigns, but processing times of 10 minutes or more are not unusual.

When complete you’ll get data tables and graphs showing the analysis of your Google campaigns. The provided report doesn’t offer Yahoo or MSN versions yet, but you could modify the template yourself if you wish. Similarly, this report analyzes ROI – and ROAS version will be released in the future, or you could modify this one if you track ROAS rather than ROI.

In our example, we see that 23% of our campaigns have achieved or exceeded our top goal delivering a 1715% ROI average. Better yet, 1% of our spend is bringing in over 22% of our revenue. Those are productive campaigns.

Interestingly, only 2 of our campaigns are between our minimum and our target. Which leaves a whopping 29 campaigns, or 97% of our spend falling below our designated ‘poor’ ROI levels. The Ad Group analysis tells a similar story. We have some huge winners and a lot of sub-par performers.

Next Steps
The ROI distribution report provides perspective. It pulls you out of the trees of keywords and click-through-rates and gives you a sense of the forest where and how your money is being spent.

You may wind up running the report several times, adjusting the target values as you go, to find the goals which really represent what means ‘great’ and ‘poor’ to you. Armed with the final results, you can move back into ClickEquations itself and filter campaigns or ad groups by their ROI, displaying those falling into one grouping or another, and then diving in to analyze why they’re delivering their current performance levels and seeing if there is anything you can and should do to improve them.

In many cases, the immediate inclination when seeing how many campaigns or ad groups are under-performing is to consider shutting them down. If you need to immediately cut expenses or boost overall returns, this may be a good idea.

But more typically the metrics you get at the campaign and ad group level represent the average of too many bundled keywords, of too many different text ads, and too much diversity of match types and search queries.

You have to take the time to dive into the ad groups to see which keywords or text ads are really causing the poor performance. Over time, however, it is true that better ad group and campaign organization can help to make these numbers more actionable.

How It’s Built
One somewhat technical point about how the ROI distribution report is built using ClickEquations Analyst is worth noting. This report uses a very powerful feature of Analyst, which is the ability to ‘Aggregate’ data rather than just gather it.

This report is not built by pulling all the individual campaign or ad group performances into Excel and then doing a lot of calculations. Rather we simply tell Analyst that we want it to aggregate the data – counting how many campaigns hit a certain criteria and summing up their expenses and revenues.

The ability to have ClickEquations Analyst do data aggregation as pulls data into Excel make a wide range of analysis reports and dashboards very easy to define and create.

If you missed our recent webinar, Master Search Queries to Save Money and Increase Conversions, you’re in luck. The recording is now available below and in our free resources section.

Watch the search query webinar to learn:

• What search queries are
• Where to find search queries
• The best way to organize your search queries to identify opportunities to save money and increase conversions
• Actions you should take daily, weekly and monthly to profit from search queries

Links mentioned in the webinar:

• ClickEquations Analyst
• ClickEquations Analyst Templates
• Microsoft Advertising Intelligence
• Google AdWords: Keyword Tool

Finding Synonyms for Low Volume Keywords

As you monitor your search queries, the actual words searchers type vs. the keywords you buy, you’ll find two types:

1. Winners – Search Queries that convert (or assist) profitably and may be worth promoting to Exact Match at a higher bid
2. Losers – Search Queries that generate clicks and cost without any value. They’re definite candidates for negative keywords at the campaign or ad group level.

You can get even more bang from your Winners and Losers by looking for synonyms with 2 free tools: Microsoft Advertising Intelligence and Google AdWords: Keyword Tool.

These data sets, however, are limited. The more niche your term, the harder it can be to find additional words. If you’re working in B2B or other low volume verticals, you’ll need a different tactic.

Enter: Google’s related searches.

Finding Long Tail Synonyms with Google’s Related Searches

At the end of some search results pages, Google presents a list of related terms to help searchers:

These lists can be a good source for synonyms for your niche terms. It’s tedious to scroll through the page. Instead, use Google’s Wonder Wheel option to speed up your research.

At the top of your search results, click “Show Options” (the plus sign). Then choose Wonder Wheel in the left nav.

The result is a hub and spoke graphic that shows you related queries. Now, you can conduct searches and see the gather synonyms more quickly:

For more tips, check our our free white papers and videos. Sign up for our free monthly Paid Search Professionals Newsletter.