ClickEquations Blog

Anyone who has managed a serious paid search campaign knows the work isn’t easy.

Eighteen months ago in a series of posts on this blog, I discussed some of the reasons why that’s true, namely a lack of clarity surrounding the data, difficulty in prioritizing opportunities and risks, and generally inefficient tools.

Not surprisingly, these issues have greatly influenced the capabilities we’ve been adding to the ClickEquations paid search platform.

This week we’re releasing a ClickEquations V2 which takes a giant step towards addressing the issue of prioritization.

What Should You Do Today?

Paid search provides, as our friend Avinash has called it, “more data than God intended us to have.” We manage huge campaigns in changing business and competitive environments, and generate hundreds of thousands or millions of pieces of data every day. And there are dozens of variables that control the thousands upon thousands of keywords in our accounts.

So every day when you log into your accounts, your have to play detective. You have to sort through all the new data, to discover what is going on, and try to determine why. Of course, you’re not looking for just one thing, but have to keep in mind dozens or even hundreds of issues that could be ‘wrong’ in your account at that particular moment.

The reports aren’t going to tell you that anything is wrong. It’s up to you to notice that something is wrong, or could be improved.

Then you have to turn into a Doctor. You have to diagnose the problem and choose the correct remedy. The symptoms may not be clear and some of the alternatives may be risky.

And finally you must become the technician, implementating the prescribed solution – which could be as easy as a button click or a complex procedure with many steps and perhaps a lot of repetition.
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Sounds Like A Job For Software

Until now, paid search software really didn’t help with this problem. It collected data, presented it to you, and enabled you to make changes.

Everything in the middle – identifying, diagnosing, prescribing – was left up to you.

This has been a huge challenge. It’s hard to spot every problem ever time it appears. It’s hard to always know what to do. And sometimes when you know what to do it’s hard to implement it.

Shouldn’t your software help?

Best Practices in ClickEquations

The new automated best practices in ClickEquations tackle this problem. Now instead of conducting daily searches for every possible issue you might to prevent, or each opportunity you may wish to exploit, the software will do it for you.

You specify the conditions you want to watch out for – choosing from a list of ready-to-use best practices. ClickEquations will then monitor your account and point out, for every campaign, ad group, keyword, and text ad, every best practice violation as soon as it occurs.

You can then drill down on just the elements that need your attention with just a click. To help you understand just what the risk or opportunity is, and the types of solutions that are most likely to be appropriate, another click provides detailed descriptions and a list of recommended potential solutions or actions.

And finally (although this really isn’t a part of the best practices feature) we’ve made it much easier and more efficient to execute the kind of changes that correct at least some of these issues.

A New Relationship With Your Paid Search Software

The overall effect of our best practices feature is amazing. Now as you browse your account, you get pro-active suggestions for ways to improve your results.

When you log in each day, there is a suggested work list waiting for you. And when you polish those off you feel confident that your account is on the right track at least in terms of a pretty wide set of important issues.

There will still be much work left to do, but now you can spend your time and brain power on more advanced issues, creative solutions, and issues truly unique and strategic to your individual account.

A Journey Of A Thousand Paces

The best practices features in the ClickEquations V2 release define the direction for the next generation of paid search software. It’s time for software to not just enable paid search management, but actually add value and help us to intelligently and efficiently deliver great results.

The capabilities we’ve delivered are just the start of our vision for this type of paid search software. We’re calling it ClickEquations Adviser, and the capabilities we’ve just released will continue to expand and evolve.

Looking at the three issues described in those old blog posts, we think we’ve made some good progress:

• Clarity – The first releases of ClickEquations focused on delivering best-in-class data and reporting, and we believe that the issues of clarity are largely resolved.
• Priority – The new best practices features and new one-click segmentation capabilities (also included in this release) is a huge step towards making prioritization far easier than ever before.
• Efficiency – We’ve put in some great efficiency features – bulk and mass editing for example, but still think that a lot more can be in this area. Watch for some innovations in this area in future releases.

There is undoubtedly a lot more work to do. But paid search management is easier and more effective than it was just a year ago. The new release of ClickEquations is another important improvement. We think you’ll agree.

See For Yourself

We’ll be showing off our new features at SMX in Santa Clara this week, at OMMA in San Francisco in two weeks, and in New York at SES at the end of the month. Please join us if you can at one of these venues, or sign up for one of our weekly webinars to get a complete demonstration of ClickEquations.

Starting Monday it’ll be a busy week for ClickEquations.

First, we’ll be at OMMA in New York City, with a booth at the OMMA Global Show. Stop by to say hello or catch a demo of ClickEquations.

Mid-week, ClickEquations CEO Lucinda Holt will be in Las Vegas at Shop.org. No booth for us this year, but if you’ll be there and would like to talk, contact us at info@clickequations.com and we’ll set something up.

On Weds and Thursday I’ll be in Los Angeles at the PPC-Summit. I’m speaking on Weds afternoon about Strategies and Tactics for AdWords.

If you want to get some advanced PPC training I think the two day event will be great. To arrange a discussion or meeting while I’m on the west coast – shoot us an email (info@clickequations.com) and we’ll set something up.

Of none of these shows match your travel plans, SMX-East is just a few weeks away…

Manoj Jasra of the blog Web Analytics World talked with Alex Cohen about ClickEquations. This in-depth interview was just published, and worth checking out.

Some highlights:

[Manoj]: Give us a brief description of what ClickEquations does and some of its greatest benefits

[Alex Cohen]: ClickEquations is the tool we dreamed of having years ago when we managed paid search accounts directly using other tools or working directly in the engine interfaces….We know the frustration of not being able to get the data you need, of slow reporting interfaces, and of the frustrating multi-step (and often multi-tool) repetitive processes that fill the days of many PPC professionals. Our old pet peeves are directly responsible for the best features in ClickEquations. (Read The Complete Answer.)

[Manoj]: ClickEquations is known for its slick interface, so what makes your interface so good

[Alex Cohen]: The most frequent comment we get from people who see us at trade shows or on our weekly webinars is “it’s so clear you guys really understand ppc”. There are all kinds of large and small aspects of our interface and product that come from our deep practical experience in the space…. The other thing about our interface is that we realize the importance of context. Most tools seem to developed with the goal of replicating the AdWords or AdWords Editor interface, supporting three engines, and then adding a few bells and whistles. We think this is a fundamentally flawed approach. (Read The Complete Answer.)

[Manoj]: How does attribution fit into your solution?

[Alex Cohen]: This is a great example of where a lack of the right data and clear access to it can really make it hard to make smart paid search decisions…Yet the conversion tracking features from the search engines and most analytics and even paid search tools, give 100% revenue credit to the last keyword… ClickEquations supports four attribution models so our users can both choose how they want to distribute revenue among keywords and more importantly see and make choices based on the differences. (Read The Complete Answer.)

[Manoj]: Tell us a little bit about some of your product specific metrics such as ClickShare and ClickVariance

[Alex Cohen]: Part of our quest for clear detailed data produced the not-so-surprising realization that the search engines aren’t telling us everything we’d like to know. A lot of what they keep private is data that only they have, but some of it is buried in all the data they do provide… We have developed a series of proprietary metrics that offer additional information and insights to our clients. ClickShare and ClickVariance are two of them. (Read The Complete Answer.)

Our thanks to Manoj for covering ClickEquations on his popular blog. If anyone has follow-up questions, post them in the comments here or at Web Analytics World and we’ll chime in with answers.

Our New Facebook Page is looking for fans! If you’re a serious paid search marketer and enjoy this blog or like ClickEquations, please ‘fan up’ by clicking the button in the Facebook widget in the far right column.

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.

Like This Post? You can be a ClickEquations Facebook Fan! Just click in the widget in the far right column.

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.

The ClickEquations July 2009 Release is now live in all client accounts.

This release enhances a number of core ClickEquations capabilities and expands us into a few new areas. It includes a new  dashboard and performance charting, support for multiple accounts from the same search engine, a range of new campaign editing capabilities, enhancements to our bulk-editing features, more metrics, better Content Network Support, and richer options around our bid management capabilities.

Complete details are available in our Release Notes, but here’s a quick summary:

Enhanced Dashboard
The ClickEquations Manager dashboard has been expanded and moved front-and-center in the web application. An enhanced set of performance metrics are now visible at-a-glance for each current engine account, and a new set of performance charts and graphics (covering costs, revenue, ROAS, ROI, Average Order Values, CTR, CPC, and more) are available. The new dashboard allows you to gain a quick yet comprehensive view of the performance of your paid search campaigns.

Multi-Account Support
Large advertisers and those with segmented accounts often have several AdWords or AdCenter accounts managing keywords for a single website. ClickEquations now supports any number of accounts per engine per client. Each account can be viewed individually in our reports or management interface, or you can view roll-ups of performance across multiple accounts. Detailed or aggregated reporting is also supported in ClickEquations Analys, our Excel plug-in.

International Character and Currency Support
ClickEquations can now be configured for any North American, Central American, South American, European and Australasian currency and date/number formatting system.

Expanded Account Management & Editing
A number of small and large enhancements have been made to how you can manage campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and text-ads within ClickEquations. For example, we’ve expanded our support for adding new campaigns and ad groups and setting options for them, and now allow Dynamic-Keyword-Insertion (DKI’s) in text ads added via ClickEquations. Bid changes and bid rule assignments can now be made across multiple ad groups at once, and we’ve rounded out our support for the content network with separate bidding controls as supported in all the different engines.

Improved Bulk Editing
The powerful bulk editing features introduced in our May release have been extended to cover bulk editing of text ads. In addition, you can now export keywords or text ads at the engine, campaign, ad group levels – so it’s easier to work in Excel to make mass changes (which can be re-imported in a single click) or copy campaigns or ad groups from one engine to another.

New Bid Management Options
Control over custom bid rules has been improved, with greater precision and flexibility over the lookback periods which define the data set any rule takes into account (including support for calendar or click-based ranges). This makes it easier to create rules which apply to a wider range of buying cycle realities. We’ve also extended support for our four revenue attribution models down to the bid rule level – so each individual bid rule can now use data based on either last-click, first-click, linear, or weighted revenue numbers.

New Reporting Metrics
Responding to customer requests, we’ve added the country name column to our Geographic reports, and the CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) metric to our Text Ad reports.

Updated ClickEquations Analyst & Templates
There is also a new release of our ClickEquations Analyst Excel Plug-in to accompany this release, and an entirely refreshed set of default report and dashboard templates. In addition, there are a number of brand new reports and dashboards including:

• All Engines Dashboard. A detailed performance dashboard showing aggregated results for all search engines and for each individual search engine. Week over Week performance trends are noted, and key performance metrics are graphed.
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• Match Type Analysis. Get an instant analysis of your keywords and performance based on your use of match types. A great way to see if you’re too ‘broad match heavy’ or how much greater your revenue-per-click is for exact match keywords.
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• Keywords By Engine. Shows top performing keywords in each search engine, allows you to quickly compare how individual keywords are performing across the search engines. This frequently shows opportunities to add keywords to engines to expand traffic and revenue. (This one was featured in a post by Avinash and discussed in more detail here.)
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• Keywords By Query Count. Shows how many different search queries where matched to each keyword, making it easy to see where you should expand keywords and add new match type coverage.

Following our last release by just over two months, this release expands and fill-in some gaps in our management and editing capabilites, adds key structural capabilities – namely support for multiple accounts and international organizations, and continues to add the powerful details like attribution control for bid rules that serious PPC managers seem to love about ClickEquations.

We invite all our clients to attend an update training webinar (first session today at 1PM), and everyone else to sign up for a full demonstration webinar for ClickEquations.

Full new video demo’s will be up soon and everyone is invited to come see us in person at SES in San Jose next week.

Greg Meyers, aka SEMGeek, posted an exclusive Q&A with ClickEquations President & Founder Craig Danuloff. Read the interview to Craig’s take on the PPC market and what differentiates ClickEquations from the competition.

Here’s a taste:

QUESTION #7. What would you say is the “secret sauce” of the ClickEquation’s Platform? Is it a specific tool or a combination of functions?

ANSWER: I think our customer base would tell you that our ‘secret sauce’ is our deep understanding and real-world experience as paid search managers. What people get excited about is how our interface and features address the real-world needs of full time PPC managers who are working hard to maximize their results. As you know, the truth is most search managers are massively constrained by the limitations of their tools. We’ve knocked down at least some of those limits, and have our sights on many more.

Already, our ability to match search query with the associated keyword and match type is one example. Or to show you all the keywords currently below the Google First Page Bid Estimate. Or to review top performing keywords on one engine and show which ones are missing or performing poorly on another engine. These have real world advantages and to me knowledge none of our competitors offer any of these capabilities.

Read the entire interview at SEMGeek.

If you’d like to interview anyone at ClickEquations, please contact Alex Cohen, Marketing Manager – marketing@clickequations.com

Last week in Occam’s Razor, Avinash Kaushik discussed our ‘What’s Changed’ reports, which make it easy to see which campaigns, ad groups, or keywords are doing better or worse than they were previously.

These reports showcase a core feature of ClickEquations, the ability to compare performance between any two periods and to very easily see the difference between performance in those two periods. It’s a feature that was actually inspired by an earlier post on Occam’s Razor, and was the direct result of a conversation we had with Avinash early last summer.

(Click To Zoom)

In his original post, Avinash compellingly makes the case that top 10 lists are only of limited use. Or more accurately, they’re extremely useful but only for a limited time. Once you understand the top 10 of anything, it doesn’t tend to change so looking at the top 10 keywords or top 10 ad groups day-after-day really isn’t going to help drive constant campaign improvement.

But if you look at the top 10 keywords based on rate of change in volume, or based on delta in cost-per-click, or based on increasing ROI, then you’ve got some interesting and in almost every case actionable date. (Of course, 10 isn’t a magic number, it could be the top 25 or top X. If Letterman ran a top 11 list every night, would we all say Top 11?)

Prior Period & The Delta
Taking this insight to heart, we made it simple to pull two new pieces of data for any metric available within ClickEquations: the prior period version of that metric and the size of the delta between the current period and the prior period. So if you’re running a report for ‘this month’ and ask for the number of conversions for a keyword, for example, you also get back the number of conversions for ‘last month’ and the ‘delta’ between those two values.

We use this in many default reports to conditionally format numbers and present the % change represented by the new value. So in the dashboard below we see that revenue is down 3% in Google. (Click Image to Zoom)

The full What’s Changed Reports that Avinash mentioned display results for many different metrics – Revenues, Profit (ROI), Average CPC are the defaults – sorted by the amount of change in the current period vs the prior period. Each report shows the top 10 for each metric by amount of change in terms of both increase and decrease.

Each report also includes a handy bar chart showing the growth in revenue, in this case by campaign.

The default reports provide all of the above for Google and Yahoo (on separate pages), and cover both Campaigns, Ad Groups, and Keywords. By default they’re month over month reports, but using our Quick Change Palette you run them for any time period with a single click.

Making more significant customizations is pretty easy. You can change the metrics to shift Profit (ROI) to ROAS, for example, or any metric to any other. You can even customize the dates of the ‘prior period’.

All ClickEquations Delta reports automatically calculate values for the mirror-image prior period of any specified date range. So if you request a report for yesterday, the numbers will compare yesterday to the day before yesterday. If you choose this week, the report will compare this week to last week. But you can elect to specify the prior period as any arbitrary period, so you could compare this month to last July, or Valentines Day weekend to Presidents Day weekend, or whatever you’d like.

What’s Changed Reports can easily be created for other aspects of your PPC campaign too. Want a report to show the top 25 products selling faster this month than last month? How about one showing the geographies where sales are dropping the fastest? Each of these and many others are rather quick customizations in ClickEquations Analyst – after which they can be refreshed with one button push anytime.

A Sneak Peak
We’ve come to think very highly of these What’s Changed Reports as action drivers for PPC campaigns. So much so that in the next release of ClickEquations, we’ve moved the core What’s Changed reports onto the main dashboard. In a new tabbed-reports interface, you’ll be able to see the campaigns or keywords which are ‘changing’ anytime, and quickly dive into more details or to take corrective action.

Watch for more news on our upcoming release in the next few weeks.