ClickEquations Blog

We’re back on the road this week at Search Engine Strategies in San Francisco. If you haven’t signed up yet, you can still register and get 20% off with the code 20CLIE.

If you’re coming, please say “hi”

• Stop by booth 321 to check out a live demo of our latest feature, Keyword Zoom. We’re also giving out hard copies of our popular “21 Secret Truths of High Resolution PPC” ebook and Quality Score white paper. Craig will be there to answer your toughest PPC questions.
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• I’ll be speaking on the Search Marketing Toolbox panel on Thursday at 12 alongside David Szetela of Clix Marketing, Ariel Bardin of Google, Dave Snyder of Blueglass, Mark Jackson of Vizion Interactive and our moderator, Simon Heseltine of AOL. Check out my latest article on Search Engine Watch for a sneak preview of my speech.
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• You can also catch me in the Search Engine Watch booth on Wednesday from 2:00 – 3:00 for their “meet the experts” series. I’d love to meet some folks who read my articles or the ClickEquations blog. We can even crack open a laptop and take a look at your account.

If you’d like to setup a specific time to swing by, just drop me a line at marketing@clickequations.com. We’ll also be at many of the networking events, so follow us on Twitter to stay in touch: @clickequations and @digitalalex

See you in San Francisco!

We’re cohosting a free webinar with our friends at Compete to share 2 unconventional techniques to finding the right keywords (or, rather, search queries).

Keywords are the gateway in PPC advertising that connect your business to prospects. But, how do you find keyword niches that are profitable?

In this free webinar presented by Compete and ClickEquations, you’ll learn 2 unconventional keyword research techniques

1. Competitive Intelligence – Discover which words are driving traffic to your competitors sites and which ones drive engagement.
2. Search Query Mining – Uncover the real words people use before they click on your text ad and stop irrelevant clicks

You’ll leave with actionable tips and free tools  you can use immediately to improve your PPC campaigns. Space is limited. Register now!

A lot of people who come to ClickEquations have never used dedicated paid search management platform before. They recognize that the right paid search platform can give you a competitive edge – you can spend more time optimizing your paid search programs and less time dealing with repetitive issues.

But, the buying process can be often be overwhelming. It’s easy to get caught up in long spreadsheets of feature lists. If that sounds like you, you might want to attend PPC Summit’s free webinar, “The Top Three Mistakes Marketers Make When Choosing a Bid Management Tool” this Wednesday, 2 EST / 11 pst.

You’ll get glimpse inside PPC Summit’s 2010 PPC Management and Optimization Report, including:

• The one thing to help you make smarter buying decisions
• The common practice that leads to buyer remorse and what to do about it
• Where paid search is heading and why that matters to your business
• Important lessons you don’t have to learn the hard way

We’re sponsoring the webinar, but the report is not sponsored and is vendor neutral. It’s much more about how to approach the process of choosing a platform more effectively.

Register Now!

We’ll be in Seattle this coming week in full force.

The ClickEquations booth will be on the show floor, we’re speaking in several sessions, introducing at others, and hosting birds-of-a-feather lunch tables. We might even go out at night and have a few drinks. You just won’t be able to miss us if you’re there.

The sessions where we’re speaking:

• Tuesday, 10AM – Quality Score: I’ve been allowed to bust-out of the traditional 15 minute format, and really go wild to dive deep into the mysteries of Quality Score. We’ll cover the facts, myths, conspiracies, and even maybe have an audience quiz with prizes!
• Tuesday, 3PM – Text Ad Testing: Alex Cohen will entertain and inform on the text ad panel. Alex blew out the doors in London so expect a great presentation.

At the ClickEquations booth, we’ll be offering demos of our platform, and offering a sneak-peak at some truly amazing new features that will be made public later this summer. Stop by and ask to see the secret stuff!

We hope to see you in Seattle!

We had a chance to sit down with James Green of Siftable to chat about ClickEquations, the state of the search market and the search marketing problems with think software is uniquely capable of solving.

James profiled our software in his platform review and our built-in Excel tool, ClickEquations Analyst:

ClickEquations had a separate Excel plug-in, which is included in the cost, called ClickEquations Analyst that is used for reporting. All I can say about this is – “Holy Crap”. I’m not much for urban slang but this piece was off the hook. Essentially what they do is have a set of canned reports (they’ll create custom reports to your business upon request) with some customization which is pretty cool but where this excels (pun intended) is in their integration with Excel.

It’s one of our favorite pieces too

James and I sat down for lengthier talk about search marketing in general and the search tool market:

We, as the advertising community, need to demand from Google transparency and control. They’re taking our money and therefore, we have a say. They’ve spent all the money on the marketplace that we profit from, but they’re also profiting from our participation in that marketplace.

We, as the advertising community, constantly need to be pushing the boundaries with Google and constantly need to be pressuring them to give us the level of transparency and control that we want. I think all the tools in our market, including ClickEquations, help because they push Google to align themselves better with our business goals. If Google was offering all these things we were doing, there wouldn’t be a market for tools like ours, but they’re not because the way we serve the advertising market and community isn’t necessarily what serves Google’s purposes.

Read Siftable’s ClickEquations review and interview with me. Thanks James!

If you’d like to interview anyone at ClickEquations, please email me, acohen @ clickequations.com

Alex and I are  just back from SMX Advanced London. It was a really enjoyable event – great venue, nice city (hadn’t been in years), perfect weather (for the 30 second walk from the hotel), really nice set of attendees from an amazing array of countries, and for the most part very informative panels.

As at the US-based SMX shows, the PPC crowd is dwarfed by the SEOs. But there was a dedicated PPC track on Day 1 and there were about 50 folks in most of the sessions. On Day 2 social took over from SEO, and analytics replaced PPC, and split stayed the same – I guess social is more fun than analytics.

My personal favorite presentations were Karl Blanks of Conversion Rate Experts, who is clearly a super-sharp guy and did a killer job of explaining the how’s and why’s of serious A|B or MVT conversion rate testing, and the inimitable Marty Wientraub of AimClear who along with his colleague Merry Morud just absolutely tore-it-up in the FaceBook marketing session. (I have a video of that in its entirety, but you wouldn’t believe it even if you saw it – catch their act when it comes to town!).

Search the #SMX HashTag to review the play-by-play from this great show.

Our Panels

I was on two panels, the first was called ‘Exploring Google’s New Ad Formats’, and the second was ‘Amazing New PPC Tactics’.

In the first I talked about how to think about all the new ad formats, and ways to evaluate them and all the upcoming changes and new formats we haven’t even seen yet. The slides don’t really tell the story so I’m not posting them, but I hope to turn the ideas into a full blog post or maybe even a webinar sometime soon.

I have shared the slides from my PPC Tactics (below) because I think these do make sense without the audio. These are all topics that have been covered here in past posts – it’s sort of a greatest hits of High-Resolution PPC,

Alex Cohen gave a rip-roaring presentation on Day 2 at the ‘Top 10 Customized Search Analytics Reports’ session. His slides are below, but it’s a shame you can’t hear the great delivery and info as he presented it. Maybe one day a video will turn up somewhere…

We met a lot of new people at the show, and it was great to see and catch up with a surprising number of friends, clients, and people just about to add ClickEquations to their PPC tools arsenal. Thanks to Chris Sherman for setting up and hosting this great event.

Alex Cohen and I are in London this week, speaking at SMX Advanced.

If you’ll be there, come check us out at these sessions:

• May 17 – 10:30am : Exploring Google’s New Ad Formats
• May 17 – 1:00pm : Amazing New PPC Tactics
• May 18 – 1:15pm: Top Ten Customised Search Analytics Reports

To schedule a personal meeting while we’re here, just email us at marketing@clickequations.com.

We’ll be at SES New York next week in full force.

If you haven’t had a chance to see ClickEquations V2 this is a great chance for an in-depth demo.

Or just to say hello.

• Come visit the ClickEquations Booth.
• Get your free printed copy of The 21 Secrets of High Resolution PPC (at the booth, you have to ask…)
• I’m speaking on the ‘PPC Super Tools‘ session on Weds at 2:15pm
• We’ll be behind a glass at all the best parties.

See you in New York.

A few weeks ago I sat down with Avinash to discuss the ideas behind the new Best Practices features in ClickEquations.

In this 5 minute video Avinash shares his thoughts on the benefits of having your paid search software find risk and opportunity within your account, and have those alerts waiting for you when you’re ready to go to work in your account.

Does your paid search management platform offer best practices? Shouldn’t you sign up for a ClickEquations Demo?