ClickEquations Blog

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

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

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

I focused on three aspects of success with text ads:

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

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

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

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

A few months ago when we first began publicly discussing the ClickEquations paid search platform, I wrote about why we developed ClickEquations after years as a paid search agency and our experience with a number of other leading tools.

Our premise was that everything had to built upon great data. That’s why our initial release was focused on providing not only all the standard metrics but also a lot of information most existing tools don’t, such as:

• Impression Share
• ClickShare
• ClickVariance
• Search query data at the keyword level
• Quality Score and Min First Page Bid
• Net profit and ROI based on actual COGS of each item

And access to all this data had to be fast and flexible, which is why we created over 40 default and customizable browser-based reports, and our Excel plug-in which enables all kinds of amazing custom reports and dashboards with one-button updates.

Over the past few months we’ve shown ClickEquations to many of the top paid search managers – leading bloggers, top PPC folks at the world’s largest agencies, and million-dollar-per-month spending advertisers.

The feedback has been consistent; we were told over and over again that no other package come close to ClickEquations in terms of data collection or reporting.

And as a result in just a few months we’ve added major agencies, very large advertisers, and some of the industry’s most advanced practitioners onto our platform.

Now Including: Management and Bidding
But we also heard clearly there was more to do beyond that initial release.

Most specifically, we heard requests for more comprehensive campaign management and editing, with complete bid automation.

This wasn’t surprising. That was the clear next step on our roadmap, as stated back in Sept: “With comprehensive data and flexible reporting in place, the next natural step is the ability to make changes and take action – the core of what the category defines as paid search management.”

So we’re pleased to announce that this new release of ClickEquations adds full paid search management capabilities and powerful bid management and automation.

Click this or any image in this post to see larger screen shots.

Our editor is great. It’s fast, easy to use, and very powerful. At any level in your account you can open an editing tray at the bottom of the screen and make the desired changes. Click ‘save’ and your Google, Yahoo, or MSN account is updated instantly.

Our bid automation is powerful. There are built-in algorithms that provide the core capabilities for different goals such as bid-to-position, target ROAS, or ROI maximization – and then use defined options and parameters you can set to define the rules you want applied at the ad group or keyword level.

You can choose to have bid changes submitted automatically, or presented as suggestions you can review and either reject or accept or modify before submission. And we’ve included a clear bid history so you can easily see when changes were made, who made them, and why.

And More
There are other improvements in this release too. Such as a new central dashboard with account statistics and performance graphs, further refinement and extension of the data field available in our reports, another step forward in the interface, and more. Future posts will provide further details on these and other changes.

And Beyond
As the ‘Why’ post describes, we don’t think great data, reporting, and editing are enough. We’re also delivering features that help prioritize opportunity and risk, formalize testing, and automate tasks.

You can see examples in the innovative reports presented in ClickEquations Analyst (our Excel Plug-in) and our multivariate text-ad testing utility. Even in these first few releases there are capabilities very different than those provided in any other paid search software.

Moving forward, 0ur goal is to push the mechanical tasks of filling in blanks in search engine advertising forms slowly but surely into the background, and bring the broader marketing work of finding, qualifying, and converting customers to the forefront.

If you’re a serious paid search manager or an agency that manages significant PPC spend then we’re confident you’ll be impressed with all the ways that ClickEquations helps you more efficiently deliver better results.

To see this new version of ClickEquations, you can visit our booth if you’ll be at SMX in San Jose this week, sign up for our next demo webinar on Weds Feb 17, or just sign up for a free demo.

Months ago we were sharing our development progress with our advisor Avinash Kaushik and asking him for input in terms of the kinds of search analytics capabilities we should include in ClickEquations.

Avinash, like another charismatic leader, shared his passion for change.

“It’s fine to see the top 50 keywords by clicks, or the top 10 ad groups by revenue” he said, but what is much more powerful is to see what’s changed -- the keywords making money today that were not making money yesterday. Or the campaigns that performed well last month, and are not performing well today.”

There is a great post on the subject of this approach to reporting on his well respected blog, written about the time this conversation took place.

In our talk he went on to explain that “the top ten of anything rarely changes. With the Delta Reports you can truly see “what’s changed” and what changes is what’s actionable. If keywords were suddenly producing clicks or conversions, a marketer can and should go figure out why.”

This leads to another word you hear often when talking to Avinash -- “insight”.

“When they go and figure out why a keyword or campaign is suddenly performing or failing to perform, they’ll likely learn something about their business or market. Something they can capitalize on.”

ClickEquations Analyst Delta Reports
The conversation inspired us to add a major new capability to our ClickEquations Analyst Excel Plug-in.

The Delta Report tables make it possible to request information about any PPC metric, and get back a sorted list based on the difference between two time periods.

Or as Avinash would say, we show you what’s changed:

• So you can request the top 100 keywords making more money this week than last.
• Or the 5 campaigns whose click-through-rates have dropped the most dramatically between January and last September.
• Or the worst 5 ad groups in terms of declining impressions.
• Or just about any period-to-period comparison pre-sorted by the amount of change.

See These Reports In Action
The Delta Report tables in ClickEquations Analyst allow you to request any data for any time-frame, and build whatever report or dashboard you need. They automatically compare the selected timeframe to the prior period (this week to last week, last month to the month before it) or you can specify any two arbitrary periods to compare.

This is very powerful.

But we include pre-built reports that are ready-to-use and take advantage of these features too.

One is our Growth/Decline Report which shows you twelve different views of your campaign and keywords based on the amount of growth and decline against a variety of metrics including clicks, revenue, and profit.

This report is the subject of the next video in our ‘ClickEquations in 90-Seconds’ series -- which is now live on YouTube and below.

Video: ClickEquations In 90 Seconds -- Growth/Decline Report

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PS: Thanks to Avinash for the idea and inspiration.

The post a few days ago about Impression Share included a few screen shots from one of the reports included with ClickEquations, which provides a graphic view of Impression Share.

This new video from our ‘ClickEquations in 90-Seconds’ series provides a full tour of that report and the benefits it provides.

After yesterday’s Quality Score analysis template and post, I got to thinking about match type.

So in 15 minutes while sitting in a meeting I built this ClickEquations Analyst template which analyzes a full paid search campaign in terms of how much cost and revenue is occurring at each of the Google Match Types:

Click Image To Enlarge

It’s interesting and may need some more tweaks and consideration to make it truly useful, but I do think these taken together help get a 360-degree view of campaign performance and structure.

Template available to ClickEquations clients and trial users. Gee ClickEquations Analyst is cool.

I’m still rather obsessed with the new Quality Score metric available in the Adwords API and now inside of ClickEquations.

I’ve been using it to analyze performance of keywords in our PPC accounts, and doing some analysis of client data to try and understand the relationship between Quality Score and performance.

Trending is going to be the most interesting, but the data history is still too short for much of that. But I’ve built this cool account snapshot in ClickEquations analyst that shows what percent of the keywords in an account are getting what Quality Score, and how each level is performing.

Click To Enlarge

This template counts the keywords by Quality Score level, and plots them on a chart against revenue from each keyword group. Clearly there are other contributors – brand terms are more likely to be QS=10 for example, but in running this against nearly a dozen different accounts thus far I’ve seen that the patterns are not consistent – your choices drive quality score, it’s not uniformly applied.

ClickEquations clients and trial customers can have this template free of charge – just contact your support representative.

To learn more about Quality Score, check out our recent Quality Score Post Series.

We’re pleased to announce that Google Adwords Quality Score and First Page Bid metrics are now available in ClickEquations.

All clients and trial customers can see these metrics in the Keyword Report tab. They’re also available in Excel via ClickEquations Analyst.

After our recent Quality-Score-palooza it’s clear the impact of Quality Score is growing for Adwords Advertisers.

We’re glad to be the first Paid Search Platform to deliver this important information in our product.

High ‘First Page Bid’ Problems
As with many metrics, ClickEquations Analyst makes it possible to turn data into actionable information and save a lot of time.

Our new First Page Bid Report template does just that. It reports your Google keywords sorted in descending order of First Page Bid, showing the current bid and amount to increase your MaxCPC to hit the First Page Bid (if that’s what you want to do).

This makes it easy to spot new high First Page Bids that might occur if your Quality Score drops, if competitors move in, or Google makes algorithm changes.

Click Image To Enlarge

The current Quality Score of the keyword is shown too, so you can decide if you’d like to change the bid or work on the Quality Score.

As with all ClickEquations Analyst reports, you can update the data with a single click, or run the report for different accounts or clients.

The new report will be provided to ClickEquations customers without charge.

Want your own First Page Bid Report? Start a ClickEquations Trial today!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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