Their selection is the single largest point of control you exercise over your account. They hold the bids the (at least indirectly) impact how much you spend, and probably most importantly (and unfortunately) they’re the level at which clicks and CTR and conversions are reported.

Readers of this blog know we think the action is a level below -- where the specific search queries that have been matched to the keywords live, along with the text ad copy that people who execute those queries view and click through.

The belief is that there aren’t good or bad keywords, just queries that are worth more (when matched to the proper ad copy) and queries that are worth less (no matter what ad copy they’re matched with).

This is the reason we were the first paid search platform to offer detailed search query reporting. And even today our ClickEquations still offers by far the most complete and detailed query reporting in the industry.

But it we wanted to take it even further.

Making Search Queries Actionable

In the July release of ClickEquations queries become actionable. We’ve made it possible look inside the performance of any keyword and directly manipulate the queries that have consumed expense or driven revenue and tune the relationship between those queries and specific ad copy.

This is a huge breakthrough, and we call it Keyword Zoom.

To access Keyword Zoom you just double click on any keyword.

This which allows you to see:

• The search queries that the keyword attracted and how each performed.
• The ad copy that was shown to the people who entered these queries.
• Complete performance statistics and metrics for that keyword.

And enables you -- easily and in one place -- to:

• Turn a search query into a new negative keyword so you never pay for those kind of queries again.
• Turn a search query into a new keyword of any match type to capture more related queries and conversions.
• Edit existing ad copy or create new ads or variations to improve the alignment of queries to text ads.

The Power of Relationships

This is a killer feature because of the way it brings all of these capabilities together into one place and enables a fast and friction-free way to tune the performance of any keyword. You could have theoretically done these things before, but:

• By isolating the search queries from a single keyword, as opposed to presenting the list of all queries in an ad group or even campaign, it’s easier to focus on the implications of those queries to the keyword settings (bid and match type) and to think about how to act upon the query information.
  
• By making the transformation from search query into either positive or negative keyword a simple two-click operation (assuming you don’t want to customize any options, more of you do but there is power in having that choice) the process we call query-mining stops being a rare effort and becomes a core task in the search management workflow.
  
• By showing the full query list right next to all the text ads those searchers are seeing, it becomes far easier to reimaging and rewrite ad copy to be vastly more relevant and persuasive. Queries show a diversity and richness that it’s hard to imaging when just looking at or thinking about keywords.
  
• By showing the ad copy click and conversion performance for each different query you can for the first time see when ads are great for some searchers but poorly targeted at others. Just as keywords usually aren’t really bad or good (because some of the queries they catch are great and other queries matched to that same keyword are wastes) it frequently turns out that ad copy isn’t necessarily all bad or all good either. One text ad may work great for some queries and lousy for others -- now you can know this and act accordingly..

What’s happening here is that we’re for the first time exposing a 360-degree view around the keyword, showing how it relates to queries and ad copy and how those each relate to each other. To get a better sense of it, check out this video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=W34j4WnaACk

This ability -- the view and the fluidity with which it makes changes possible -- proves a whole new way to improve your paid search results. We’re very excited to bring you this capability in ClickEquations.

To learn more and get a complete demo of ClickEquations, attend one of our public webinars or contact us to schedule a personal discussion or demonstration.

Related posts:

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2. The Myth of Single Keyword Ad Groups The idea of creating highly targeted ad groups, so that...
3. Keyword Suggestion – Think Like An SEO when Doing PPC Keywords are one of the false gods of PPC. There’s...

One of my favorites is ‘Text Ad CTR Low’ which identifies text ads running in your ad groups which have a CTR that is some percentage lower (30% by default) than the other text ads in the same ad group. This has the potential to make huge improvements in your quality scores and overall results.

In this post we’ll look at how to setup and best use this best practice.

Setup

To begin you need to configure and start the best practice. In the Best Practices Manager, create a new ‘Text Ad CTR Low’ best practice, modify the options if necessary, and assign it to run on some or all of your campaigns.

The right option settings depend on the behavior and performance of your account. The default CTR Difference of 30% is a good starting point if you have 50 clicks or more per text ad in the defined lookback period. If you don’t have that many clicks in the desired timeframe, raise the CTR Difference to 100% and you can get statistically significant results with only 12-15 clicks.

See ‘Adding and Editing Best Practices’ in the ClickEquations help system for more detailed information and instructions.

Save your new best practice and it will run that evening. Go get a good night sleep.

Reviewing Best Practice Alerts

The ‘Ad Alerts’ section of the ClickEquations dashboard will now tell you if any your ad groups are in violation of your defined best practices. Click on the red alert counter and you can see how the under-performing ads are spread across the various search engines.

To see the problem ads on Google, click the number next to Google. The ClickEquations Manager will open to the Text Ads tab with all the problem ads displayed. From here you’ll be able to review the details of the situation in each ad group, and take corrective action.

Resolving Low CTR Text Ads

The list of text ads you’ll see only includes the ones that under-performed. If you’re in a hurry you might just pause them all, or edit the ad copy to try and boost the CTR.

But a better approach would be to dive deeper into the specifics for each ad group.

Here’s the steps you might take:

• Click on the ad group name next to the first text ad in the list. This will open tab for that ad group so you filter down to only the ads in that ad group.
• Click back to the Text ad tab to see the under-performing text ad and the ads it is competing against.
• If there are paused or deleted ads on the list, use the Edit Filter.. command to display only items with the status of Enabled, On, or Active.
• TIP: Name as save this filter as ‘Show Only Active/Enabled/On’ for future use.
• Compare the performance of the text ads to see if you really want to pause or rewrite the under-performing ad.
• Use the Verster significance checker to make sure you can be statistically confident in the results. If not, use the calendar to bring in more data from a longer time frame.
• When you have confidence in the data, take action on any under-performing ads – pause or rewrite.
• Check the box next to the under-performing ad (if you didn’t delete it) and clear the alert.
• If there are more under-performing ads, Click on the remaining number next to the Text Ad CTR Low alert in the Alerts palette, and repeat this process for the next under-performing ad.

Economic and QS Benefit

The process of eliminating poorly performing text ads from within your ad groups should have huge benefits to your account. Every under-performing ad that is eliminated will increase your CTR, which should drive up keyword quality score. And as we know, better quality score results in more impressions, higher positions, and lower CTRs.

Wrapping this process around a thoughtful effort to write and test better ad copy, and keep an eye on not only CTR but also conversion rate, can further the positive effects.

When you run lots of text ad tests – as you should – keeping track of them and waiting for sufficient data to hit some level of confidence in the results is a management challenge. Using the ClickEquations best practices to automate the management of under-performers is a dramatic improvement to the process.

Related posts:

1. Secret Truth Series #18: Effective Text Ad Testing Text ads are trying to answer questions. Writing text ads...
2. Best Practices with Avinash Kaushik (Video) A few weeks ago I sat down with Avinash to...
3. Introducing Best Practices in ClickEquations Anyone who has managed a serious paid search campaign knows...

Many of these aren’t ever deleted, they just kind of linger, cluttering our reports and screens.

The ClickEquations custom filters allow you to remove these items. You can choose the statuses you want to show, and leave off those you want to hide.

To make this even easier, create a named/saved filter. To do this:

1. Open the Edit Filter dialog box. (In Manager, under the Filters and Views pop-up)
2. Click the black arrow next to Status to open the status choices.
3. Choose the Active, Enabled, and On status options.
4. Click the check box next to ‘Save As’
5. Give your filter a name like  ’Active/Enabled/On Only’
6. Click OK.

Now you can get remove all paused, inactive, deleted, and off items from any tab by just choosing your new filter from the Apply Saved Filter menu.

Related posts:

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2. ClickEquations Feature Spotlight: Export When we added the bulk editing features to ClickEquations earlier...
3. Feature Focus: ClickEquations Manager (Campaign Editing) Our February Release introduced new campaign editing features, so in...

Writing text ads is difficult because you have only 95 characters to stand out from a sea of competing messages and persuade the searcher that you’re the ad to click.

There are many strategies and tactics to accomplish this, and both technical skill and creativity are required. The process takes considerable time and effort.

And there is only one way to measure success. Testing.

But testing requires more than simply running a couple of ads simultaneously. It requires the conditions for a fair test, a clear goal, and valid measurement and analysis. Much of what passes for text-ad testing in paid search lacks one or more of these requirements.

Let’s look a little closer at each to better understand how to properly test text ads.

Conditions For Text Ad Testing

Text ads cannot be effectively tested too early in the process of optimizing your account or ad groups.

If you haven’t yet optimized the keywords, match types, ad group organization, and negatives then the search queries coming into the ad group will be too diverse. If people are asking 25 different questions it’s impossible to compose any single answer that will satisfy all of them. If you try to test text ads too early, you won’t be able to trust the results. Maybe you’ve got a lousy text ad, or maybe the ad is just running against a lot of very untargeted or unqualified search queries.

So before even beginning to worry about text ad testing, make sure you’ve read and implemented Secret Truths #1 – #8. When the vast majority of the queries coming into an ad group are similar, you’re read to test text ads.

Of course, you have to write some text ads when you setup an ad group. And you should monitor and review their performance and make changes as necessary. But hard core text-ad testing – statistical comparisons – isn’t reasonable or necessary until the ad group has been properly constructed and intelligently optimized and – in terms of search queries – stabilized.

What You Can and Can’t Control

Another factor to consider in text-ad testing is the reality that paid search is a dynamic environment. Keywords get added, negatives expanded, bids change, competitors impact average positions, and other account modifications take place on a regular basis. There are variations in activity and results based on day of the week, week of the month, month of the year, weather, news events, sales, inventory, competitor promotions, and more.

So in the time it takes your ad group to get a sufficient number of impressions or clicks for a good test, how can you be sure that it is the ad copy that you’re really testing?

The answer is that you really can’t. There are no static environments in PPC. But all the ads in the test are subject to almost all the same environmental conditions, so many would argue these external influences don’t influence relative performance. That may be true, it may not. But you can’t control for many of these variables, so we ultimately have to accept them as a fact of life, a limitation in the system.

Whenever possible however, try to limit those changes you do control during deliberate text-ad tests. Don’t introduce new keywords or negatives or dramatically shift bids. Chance are if you find the need to make radical changes of any of these types you’d be better off making them and then restarting your tests.

Clear Text Ad Testing Goals

The goal of text ad testing is to determine which ad copy delivers the best click-through and/or conversion rates.

• Most ad testing focuses on CTR. That’s clearly the direct goal of the ad, and helps to drive up quality score.
• Conversion rate should be tracked and considered, even if CTR is the primary goal. There are many ways to incite a click, but Google gets paid for clicks while you get paid for conversions.
• The conversion-per-1000-impressions metric (CP1K) is a great way to blend these two goals and find the truly optimal ad copy. (I hope to write more about CP1K in the near future).

Statistically Valid Text Ad Testing Analysis

Assuming you have a clear goal in mind and a stable testing environment, test data becomes the next hurdle. How many impressions and clicks does a set of text ads need for a valid test?

The answer to that relatively straightforward question has eluded most PPC managers for years. I assume this is due to the fact that most of us aren’t trained mathemeticians or statisticians. (I’m certainly not.) And most of the software we use to create and edit text ads does not provided the statistical support we really need.

So we’ve slithered forward based on the conventional wisdom that suggests tracking ‘at least 100 impressions or 10 clicks before there is enough data to declare a winner’. Unfortunately this really isn’t very accruate or useful advice.

Statistically, it turns out that those of us who’ve been reacting to text-ads with anything near 100 impressions or a dozen or so clicks have regularly made essentially random decisions. We’ve paused the better ad many times, letting the loser run. We’ve sabataged our own results. Repeatedly. Over long periods of time.

Consider the example shown at right: Three text ads running in an ad group. About 500 impressions each.

Is there enough data to make a wise decision?

It seems pretty clear. The first ad at 1.98% CTR appears to be our winner. But the statistics tell us that it isn’t that clearcut.

I looked at the statistical significance and confidence intervals for these ads. We can only be 80% confident that the CTR difference between the first and second ad are actually different. Same for the difference between the second and third ad.

80% confidence is not very high.

It’s not considered high enough to be sure something is true in most activities where statistical confidence is considered. For scientific activities a 95% rate is the desired standard.

To understand the potential error in accepting these numbers, look (below) at the range of possible CTRs for each of these ads that we can be sure of with a 95% confidence.

The first ad may actually be as low as 0.82% CTR, or could be as high as 3.14%. That’s a pretty wide range – we just don’t know yet, with a high level of confidence, what the CTR of this ad is going to be. You can see similarly wide ranges for the other two ads, and in comparison see there is plenty of overlap in the potential which means if we really let this test play out, we may get a very different result.

So how many impressions would it take to get 95% confident in the differences?

If we let these ads run until they had around 1000 impressions each they’d achieve a 90% confidence. It takes nearly 1500 impressions per ad to hit 95% confidence.

The actual number needed for any given set of ads depends a lot on the CTRs and their relative difference. But it’s a rare circumstance when anything like 100 impressions or 10 clicks is adequate.

You can check the numbers on your own ads using two great tools:

• Vertster.com offers a simple, free, online utility that lets you enter CTRs for two ads and check the confidence level.
• Teascalc is an Excel sheet that costs $49 but offers a both confidence and interval data.

Making The Grade

Everything we do to create and optimize paid search accounts is done in hopes of showing the right people the right ad at the right price.

Their reaction to our ads is feedback on how well we’ve done at targeting them and organizing our accounts as well as on how aligned our answers are to their questions.

Fortunately for us if we do things right – in setting goals, creating testable conditions, and accurately measuring and analyzing we can get this feedback in clear, powerful, and actionable form.

Text ad testing isn’t just another wise and important step in paid search management. It’s the crucial step that pays off all the others.

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ‘21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying: “Everything you know about AdWords is the basics Google wanted you to know. Just enough to get you hooked. But what if there was fundamental secrets that they neglected to share? Would you want to know them? Now you can! 21 Secrets Truths is what you must read, no, act on, before your competitors do.”

- Bryan Eisenberg Conversion Expert and New York Times Best-Selling Author ’.

Download Your Copy Today
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The only limits are hours in the day, and days in the week.

But not everything you might spend time on is equally valuable, or even has equal potential. So we thought ClickEquations should make it easy to find and focus on critical aspects of your PPC accounts.

That’s why we’ve added four new ‘One-Click Segmentation’ features to ClickEquations V2 which went live last week:

• One-Click Brand Keyword Segmentation
• One-Click Head Keyword Segmentation
• One-Click Content Network Segmentation
• One-Click Custom-User-Defined Segmentation

Each of these enables you to quickly isolate the performance history and then take action on important subsets of your account.

Brand Keywords Are Special

As discussed in our ‘Success Through Negative Brand Keywords‘ post last week, keywords that contain your brand terms and phrases are distinct from your non-brand keywords, and in many ways they should be managed differently.

But many accounts still have brand keywords scattered across many ad groups and campaigns. Wouldn’t it be great to see them all (and nothing else) with just a click?

Now you can. Just choose ‘Brand Keywords Only’ from the Filters and Views menu.

You’ll near-instantly be presented with a list of all the brand keywords in your account. You can review their performance and make any necessary changes. You can even create and apply additional custom filters to run on your brand-only keywords.

Head Keywords Are Special Too

The concept of ‘head’ and ‘tail’ has got a lot of press in the last year. And we all know that a relatively small percentage of our keywords earn the lion’s share of our revenue and consume the lions share of our cost.

This has lots of implications for paid search, but most important is the fact that most of us don’t allocate our relatively precious resource, time, in proportion to the results various keywords produce. In other words, we don’t spend enough time fishing where the fish are.

Wouldn’t it be great to click that mouse of yours and see only that small segment of keywords that are driving the vast majority of your revenue? Or clicks? Or costs?

Now you can. Just choose ‘Head Keywords Only’ from the Filters and Views menu.

You even get to control the definition of ‘Head Keyword’ that you wish to use. You set the target percentage, the key metric, and the lookback period.

The results are amazing. For the account we use for demonstrations – which is a real working paid search account with about 170K keywords in AdWords, just 281 drive 80% of the revenue. Those are an important 281 keywords to focus on, which is the point of this feature.

Content is not Search

We’ve also recently discussed on this blog the distinctions between search advertising and content network advertising. Given those thoughts, it makes sense that we’d support easy segmentation of search and content within ClickEquations.

So now we do. Just choose Search Network or Content Network from the Filters and Views menu.

Any campaigns that aren’t in the group you’ve chosen, will disappear. You can review results, navigate freely, and make any additions or changes.

Most importantly, you can focus. You can think about the campaigns in terms of the distribution network. And not get confused or distracted by the entirely different numbers that come from other network type.

Custom Saved Filters

The one-click access to brand keywords, head keywords, and search or content campaigns is a great start towards making it easier to focus on what’s important within your paid search accounts.

But in the complication of paid search, there are many other segments you may also want to access quickly.

So we’ve also added very powerful named and saved filters. You can define nearly any combination of account structural elements (like ad group or keyword attributes) plus performance results (such as click-through rates or quality scores) and status flags (including paused or disapproved) and even timeframes within which elements were modified. Then just enter a name and save it for easy future application.

These filters can be used anywhere in the account – they’re smart enough to ignore irrelivant settings – so if you define CPC as one of the factors and you’re viewing ad groups, the ‘CPC’ will be ignored but the other aspects will still apply.

We all have many ways we like to slice and dice our campaigns or keywords – and now you can do so quickly and easily.

Intelligent Paid Search Management

We think there are many ways that paid search management software can transform the process of managing ppc accounts. The tools have to evolve beyond simply offering option-after-option and begin shaping the way the work is done.

We think both our best practices and the one-click segmentation features of ClickEquations V2 are great steps in that direction. Both start the shift towards ‘what you should do’ and ‘how you could do it’. For practitioners who take advantage of them, we believe they’re both time savers and clear ways to improve results.

Avinash has said that “Segmenting your data is the fastest way to finding actionable insights from your web analytics data.” You can read some of his thoughts on it here and here. We think segmenting your data is one of the best ways to prioritize too.

Spend some time in ClickEquations V2, and we think you’ll agree.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

Related posts:

1. Avinash Revisited – Part I (Keywords by Engine) Recently our friend and advisor Avinash Kaushik wrote a blog...
2. Avinash Revisited – Part II (What’s Changed?) Last week in Occam’s Razor, Avinash Kaushik discussed our ‘What’s...
3. Avinash Revisited – Part III (ROI Distribution Report) The third ClickEquations Analyst report featured in Avinash Kaushik’s recent...

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.

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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.

Related posts:

1. Avinash Revisited – Part I (Keywords by Engine) Recently our friend and advisor Avinash Kaushik wrote a blog...
2. Avinash Revisited – Part II (What’s Changed?) Last week in Occam’s Razor, Avinash Kaushik discussed our ‘What’s...
3. Avinash Revisited – Part V – Query Reports The fifth ClickEquations report featured in Avinash Kaushik’s recent blog...

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.
  .
• 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.
  .
• 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.)
  .
• 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.

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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

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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.

Related posts:

1. Avinash Revisited – Part I (Keywords by Engine) Recently our friend and advisor Avinash Kaushik wrote a blog...
2. Avinash Revisited – Part III (ROI Distribution Report) The third ClickEquations Analyst report featured in Avinash Kaushik’s recent...
3. Avinash Revisited – Part V – Query Reports The fifth ClickEquations report featured in Avinash Kaushik’s recent blog...

In this and the next few posts we’ll dig a little deeper into these reports, sharing some background about how they were created, how they can be customized and used, and how they can help you to improve your paid search campaigns using ClickEquations.

Keywords By Engine
The first report Avinash covered is a new one, set to be released in a mid-July update. It’s called the Keywords by Engine report.

This report uses a single CQ Analyst query to pull all keywords with at least 1 click over the past month, along with the number of conversions for that keyword.

This information is then pulled into a an Excel pivot table, which allows us to see how the keywords compare across engines based on either clicks or conversions.

To sort the data, you simply point to a cell in the Google, Yahoo, or MSN columns and right click. Then choose Sort > Sort Largest To Smallest. The keywords are then sorted based on the number clicks in that engine, and the other engine columns show how many clicks each keyword got in those respective engines.

As Avinash pointed out, this provides a view of pure opportunity.

Running this report for client after client has shown vast differences in how keywords perform between the search engines. While there are many differences between the engines, and some valid reasons why one keyword or another would perform differently in these different environments, it seems clear that all of your top 10 or 20 performing keywords in Google shouldn’t be non-performers in Yahoo and MSN.

Yet that is frequently exactly what is happening.

Very often it’s simple oversights that will be highlighted. Such as versions of brand terms, mis-spellings, or even domain name addresses that turn out to have been left out of one engine or another.

This report offers a great way of prioritizing the additions of new keywords to Yahoo and MSN accounts which you wish to expand. The first step would be to verify that the keywords producing great Google results (in terms of either clicks or conversions) aren’t already in those engines.

If they are there then you’ll want to try and understand why their performance is so (relatively) low. Differences in matching algorithms and search queries could explain it, so review the search query report for the ad group in the ClickEquations web application. Perhaps there are other keywords in the same ad group which are capturing those clicks or conversions in that engine.

Or it could simply be a matter of the keyword needing better ad copy, or perhaps it’s position is poor and a bid adjustment is needed.

If the keywords are missing, taking the time to ad them in each engine could be an effort with a great return.

Variations
The default query in this report gets keyword performance data for 30 days. Using the Quick Change palette you could pull data for a longer time period – perhaps 3 or even 6 months – to see if the result patterns change.

And while we’ve pre-built these keyword comparisons for both the clicks and conversion metrics, you could easily modify or extend the report to compare impressions, CTR, or even ROI. That’s the great thing about ClickEquations analyst – you have the full authoring tools to modify any of the predefined reports.

Related posts:

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2. Avinash Revisited – Part II (What’s Changed?) Last week in Occam’s Razor, Avinash Kaushik discussed our ‘What’s...
3. Avinash Revisited – Part III (ROI Distribution Report) The third ClickEquations Analyst report featured in Avinash Kaushik’s recent...