ClickEquations Blog

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.

Recently our friend and advisor Avinash Kaushik wrote a blog post in which he used ClickEquations Analyst to showcase a number of advanced analyses for paid search. Each of these used a report or dashboard which is provided to all ClickEquations customers.

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.

Last week our friend and advisor Avinash Kaushik put up another of his legendary blog posts, and we’re pleased and honored to say it features paid search analysis done in ClickEquations Analyst.

In the post Avinash looks at five different advanced PPC analysis ideas, and provides his spin on why they’re important and how you can benefit from them.

Go read his post. This week on blog posts here we’ll provide some more in-depth review of the reports and dashboards he mentioned and some additional information on how ClickEquations clients can use and extend them.

The ClickEquations May 2009 Release is now live for all clients.

This release adds a number of important core capabilities on top of our existing strengths. There are new bid algorithms and features, powerful new management features including bulk editing, and even richer support for data including support for multiple conversion events, optional revenue allocation models, and compatibility with Google Checkout.

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

• Multiple Conversion Events - You can now track up to six different conversion events in ClickEquations. This allows you to track for example, newsletter sign-ups, downloads, video starts, add-to-cart actions, or any other actions users take on your website in addition to traditional sales conversions. Each conversion event can then be viewed in reports. Use of the new conversion events requires updates to the ClickEquations tags on your website.
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• Negative Keyword Support - You can now view and manage negative keywords directly within ClickEquations Manager. Negative keywords provide an important control to save money, target your ads, and improve your Quality Score.
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• Bulk Editing Capabilities - You can now add and edit keywords or negative keywords in ‘bulk’. Several types of bulk editing are supported – you can simply enter a list of keywords and attributes, paste copied lists, or make edits in Excel and then import them. This feature can be used to easily clone campaigns from one search engine to another.
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• Multiple Item Editing - You can now also make simple changes to multiple items right within the ClickEquations Manager interface. For example, to change the bidding rule for any collection of keywords, you would simply select them within the keyword editing window and change the match type or bidding rule for all of them with a single choice in the keyword editing palette.
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• Google Checkout Support - You can now track sales and revenue transactions made through Google Checkout. These conversions are tracked using your normal shopping cart feature and are included in all ClickEquations reports.
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• Multiple Revenue Allocation Methods - You can now use four different methods of allocating revenue back to your keywords to track and measure your results. While Adwords and most packages use a simple default ‘last-click’ allocation method, many people believe this doesn’t properly value the role all keywords play in generating a conversion. In ClickEquations, you can now choose from last-click, first-click, linear, and weighted allocation methods for use as your primary revenue reporting method. This primary method drives browser-based reports and bidding rules. Via ClickEquations Analyst, however, you can see and compare the impact of all four allocation methods in any report or dashboard.
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• Global Bid Rule Options - You can now more precisely control the application of your bid rules in three important ways. First, you now have the option to define a global maximum bid to ensure that none of your rules exceed a specified bid amount. Second, you can specify the minimum size of a rule-based bid change to avoid frequent small changes. Lastly, you can control the maximum position at which you want to make bid increases – so you don’t overpay for the very top spots if there isn’t sufficient incremental return in your business case.
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• Cost-Per-Acquisition (Lead) Bid Algorithm - You can now choose to create bid rules that target a specific CPA on a keyword or Ad Group basis. These are perfect for lead-generation campaigns with a known CPA or CPL target. You can define these rules to run against any of our six supported conversion events.
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• Bid Rule ‘Intensity’ Control - You can now specify how ‘aggressive’ any of your bid rules are in seeking the defined goal. Higher intensity settings will spend money more liberally to seek the goal faster (raising the bid more dramatically to try and hit a target position, for example) where lower intensity settings will limit spending but perhaps hit your targets more slowly.
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• Simplified Product Margin and Naming - You can now directly update product name and margin information right from within ClickEquations. This makes it easier to use our Net Profit and true ROI based reporting on any campaign or keyword. Simply upload a spreadsheet with your product SKUs and associated names and margin levels, and ClickEquations will calculate the true net profit for every keyword (and ad group or campaign) based on the items sold in each conversion event. This provides much more accurate and actionable information than typical ROAS or Gross Profit reports.

There’s a lot of power and capabilities in these features, and we’ll dig deeper into the details and ways they can be used to improve your paid search management in future blog posts.

A new upgraded version of ClickEquations will be available next week. More details about the new features and enhancements will be posted here on Monday.

In preparation, we’ll be doing some work on our servers over the next few days.

Here’s what you can expect:

• ClickEquations Manager will be disabled Friday May 1, at approx. 5pm EST. It should be re-activated late on Saturday May 2nd.
• ClickEquations Reporting will be down for a few hours on Saturday afternoon May 2.

To keep up-to-date on any changes to this expected schedule, and all future service upgrades and interruptions, clients should follow our new client-only twitter stream @CQstatus (www.twitter.com/cqstatus).

This is a ‘protected-updates’ twitter account so after you submit a follow request, send us an email to support@clickequations.com with your twitter name and we’ll approve you.

We’ve got some great and frequently-requested new features and improvements to roll-out next week. Please check back Monday to learn all about them.

All the recent talk about Quality Score got me to finally figure out how to build a ClickEquations Analyst template that I’ve been wanting to for some time now.

It shows you all the keywords whose Quality Score has changed from the prior period. It could be yesterday vs the day before, this week vs last week, or last month vs the month before.

So you can try to figure out why. Or make a new bidding decision. Or just marvel at the mysteries of Google.

Like all ClickEquations Analyst reports, to use it you simply open Microsoft Excel, open the report, and open the ‘Quick-Change’ palette to select the date range you like to report on.

Click Apply and hold your breath, in this case, for about 90 seconds.

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The image above shows a zoom-in on the core data the report provides. There is one tab in Excel for the Quality Score gainers and another for the losers.

Click the thumbnail image to the left to see an enlarged full page of the ‘Gainers’ report.

This new report will be released to ClickEquations clients as an Analyst template set update in the very near future.

If you can’t wait that long, email support and we’ll get you a copy.

You don’t use ClickEquations for PPC management, reporting, and bidding? Click Here.

While Google’s Adwords Quality Score gets a lot of attention, an important and somewhat related keyword metric – the First Page Bid Estimate – hasn’t had quite as much coverage.

I’m going to tackle this one in two parts, today talking about how to monitor your FPBE’s (First Page Bid Estimates) and then in a future post digging deeper into the philosophy, politics, and implications of this metric. (You can tell that’s going to be the fun one.)

In the Adwords interface, the First Page Bid Estimate can be found on the Keyword Analysis page, which requires you first to mouse-over the magnifying glass icon next to the keyword, and then choose the ‘Ad Showing: Details and Recommendations’ link.

First Page Bid Estimate in the Keyword Analysis Window

Of course, you probably don’t care about the FPBE unless your current MaxCPC is below it. These keywords are more clearly identified, with a simple message shown below the Status indicator for each keyword.

First Page Bid Warning in Adwords

You can also add ‘Est. First Page Bid’ to a Keyword Performance Report in the Adwords Report interface and the metric has also been added to the latest version of the Adwords Editor.

In the Adwords Editor, you can even select the entire account, sort by the FPBE, and see your current Quality Score and MaxCPC in adjacent columns. This is the most useful presentation as those are the three metrics you need to both understand and use to decide on corrective action.

First Page Bid Estimate in Adwords Editor

First Page Bid Estimate Report – In ClickEquations
In ClickEquations we wanted to make use of First Page Bid Estimates even easier and more convenient.

So like the Adwords Editor, we provide the FPBE, Quality Score, and your MaxCPC next to every keyword so you can always keep an eye on these important metrics. And you can easily sort by any column to spot issues or trends.

ClickEquations Keyword Report with First Page Bid Estimate

But using ClickEquations Analyst we’ve taken it one step farther, providing the First Page Bid Estimate Report.

This Excel Template makes it easy to see your current keywords, sorted by FPBE in descending order, along with the corresponding QS, MaxCPC, Ave Position, Campaign & AdGroup names – plus a red-alert warning when you need to raise your bid to hit the FPBE.

First Page Bid Estimate Report in ClickEquations Analyst

Just by glancing down this column you can see which keywords require attention, and how much that attention is going to cost you. The data in the report can be updated with a single-click.

Keywords in your account which are currently bid below their First Page Bid Estimate are either not showing (if they have a low Quality Score) or showing at a highly diminished rate.

In effect, you’re currently not actively advertising on those keywords, which is why we think this kind of quick summary report is important.

In Part II of this post we’ll dig deeper into the why’s and what-to-do’s of the First Page Bid Estimate.