Each time someone executes a search, they’re asking a question.

They search because they want to learn about something. Or find out where something is. Or discover who has it or knows about it.

They may just be curious, or the question may have been provoked by some urgent problem.

The question could be simple or complex and the searcher might be sophisticated or incredibly naive.

Search Engines answer questions. That’s pretty much all they do.

Search results offer an ordered list of answers to the question the search engine thinks you’re asking.

Paid search advertising is your chance to raise your hand and let the searcher know that you think you have the answer to their question too.

In the next post we’ll discuss what it means to the organization of your campaigns to think of yourself as a professional answer provider.

This post is part of a series on High Resolution PPC, a framework for understanding and managing paid search advertising.

This coming week, October 21-23, we’ll be in Washington DC at the Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit.

If you’ll be there, stop by for a ClickEquations demo, let us answer any questions you might have, or get setup for a free trial.

The exhibition hall is open Tues and Weds. To schedule a private discussion or demo time, just contact us at info@clickequations.com.

• Failed attempt to move website and blog off Dreamhost. Sites may be down if you try them - should be back soon and we’ll escape later. #
• On a better note, playing with way out of the box ideas about visualizing and navigating the components of a PPC campaign. #
• What’s the best way to engage the entire emetrics audience in 2-minutes? Goal is to get them to visit the ClickEquations booth. Ideas? #
• I’m going to be on PPC Rockstars with David Szetela on Monday. http://bit.ly/1oJcLm Cool. #ppc #

A nice surprise from Google today, with the release of independent statistics for ad-group performance on the Google ‘Search Network’ - sites like AOL and Ask.com.

This is no doubt related to the Google-Yahoo deal and clammoring on this blog and elsewhere about the issues involved in integrating those reports. It’s great that reporting is now separate - next we need separate bidding options like they provide for the Content Network.

Interestingly, in one of our campaigns the search network bid is set to ‘auto’. I don’t know what that means. Are they going to auto-lower bids on search partners? Better than keeping them the same as bids on the Google network, but I’d still prefer advertiser control.

• If ‘Sarah’ is from Google, this is important insight into Quality Score - http://bit.ly/2i189q #ppc - Such as there are two of them. #
• Google Adwords Search Query Report Reveals exactly 2.51% of our queries over the last 4 days. That’s not a lot. #ppc #
• Should a search query totally unrelated to a Broad Match keyword buy be refundable? If you order soup, you can send back a mistaken salad. #
• First signed ClickEquations client is a whopper! At least we won’t have to quibble about whether we can handle large accounts/websites. #

This week was my first chance to attend an SMX show. Having seen SES mushroom into a massive show that invariably attracts a very diverse crowd, it was great to see that SMX really is a spin-off which attracts a more serious and experienced group of search marketers.

We talked to a lot of PPC Managers at the ClickEquations booth. Reactions were great, and hopefully many of them will be getting set up as part of our Charter Program over the next few weeks.

I also had a chance to speak with lots of the well-known in this world, including old friends like Bryan Eisenberg, our Advisor Avinash Kaushik (whom we also got to visit at Google NYC which was an intellectual and culinary treat), John Marshall from MarketMotive, and some people I hadn’t met before including Mike Grehan, and David Szetela from Clix Marketing.

The internet, as we all know, is the most trackable vehicle for marketing ever created. Everything that goes through these tubes can be perfectly tracked, traced, documented, and reported on.

Ya, right.

They never mention the two little requirements:

1. Every page must be properly tagged.
2. Every inbound/referring URL must be properly tagged.

(In the broader sense there is of course a third issue - I’m leaving aside for now the vast weaknesses of cookies and the role they play in online tracking/accuracy.)

Why Is Tagging So Hard?

By which I mean to ask two questions:

• Why do people find it so hard to add tags? The requirement (in the simplest cases) is to accurately cut-and-paste. (Yes there are more complex cases where parameters have to be passed, for now let’s leave those aside.) Yet in enterprise environments we often see multi-month waiting times, panels and commissions and committees who need to approve them, and all forms of insanity as prerequisite to getting 316 characters in a single text-block added to the universal footer of a website, or 75 characters appended to a URL.
• Why do the environments make tagging so complex? This is the other side of the coin. Web pages and URLs need tags. This may have been a requirement not foreseen in the mid ’90’s when core web technology was developed, but it has one for many years now. Yet neither web servers nor CMS systems nor email managers nor Google/Yahoo themselves have made tagging anywhere near as simple as they could.

Tagging - A System Requirement

While I’ll fully admit to having no understanding or appreciation for ‘IT Depts’ who can’t figure out how to allocate time to update page tags (and testing them thoroughly) on at worst a weekly or monthly basis, the more I think about this problem the more I think the root of the problem is in the technology layer itself.

Software that builds or serves web pages should have the ability to conditionally add ‘tracking pixels’ or ‘code snippets’ or ‘page tags’ or whatever you want to call them to each page, and provide a single management interface for controlling these included codes, defining the conditions on which they’re embedded, and even to make the parameter passing necessary in the most complicated cases, easier.

Software that creates or delivers URLs should similarly have the ability to simply and centrally administer the appending of tracking codes to those URLs.

In Adwords, for example, there should be Account, Campaign, and Ad-Group level parameters for tracking codes you want appended to every target URL. Why should it be necessary to manually insert them (150,000 times) at the ad-group or keyword level?

Let’s face it, they’re universal 99.9% of the time. Didn’t they teach me in High School that computers simplify repetitive tasks?

And Verify Please

On both sides - the site and the URL - these systems should validate and report on the presence and contents of these codes after they’re served.

Sometimes it seems like 25% of the man-hours of the entire online marketing industry is spent find those situations where pages or URLs were missing tags. And almost certainly a percentage of all our reports are incorrect based on places where these tags are missing and nobody detects it.

This Rant Sponsored By

As a marketing and paid search agency we’ve had our fair share of (which is to say more than humanly endurable) issues related to getting tracking pixels on client websites and managing the tracking codes that need to be placed into emails, affiliate promotions, and paid search ads.

Very often weeks or months of reporting was ruined, never to be corrected, by pending or incorrect tracking code issues. I know this is typical and true in online marketing deptments everywhere.

As we’re rolling out ClickEquations we’re now living through another aspect of this problem.

Clients and prospects that want to take full advantage of our system and use our ClickEquations tags, but they just can’t get their organizations or vendors to support them - at least in reasonable time frames. Or there’s a problem dealing with the complexity and delay involved in having all target URLs updated in the engines (although this can at least be automated via the APIs).

We’re working on ways to make tagging easier for our clients, but the universality of the problem suggests that it really needs to be solved down a few layers in the infrastructure.

I think it’s time the amount of pain and trouble this problem is causing got more organized visibility, so the creators of those lower level systems could start feeling the pressure to add the kind of tagging support we all need.

How have tagging problems or complexities impacted your online marketing reporting? How can we fix or improve this situation?

Will you be at SMX in New York this week? Stop by as see ClickEquations in the Exhibit Area.

If you’ll be in New York City next week, please stop by and see us in the ClickEquations booth at SMX.

We’ll be there ready to demonstrate ClickEquations, answer your questions, and even get you signed up for our Free 6-mo Charter Program if appropriate.

Appointments: If you’d like to schedule a specific time for a discussion/demonstration at SMX, to consider using ClickEquations in your company, in your agency, or if you’re a blogger and would like to do a review of the product - please email at info@clickequations.com and we’ll confirm a time.

Data drives paid search.

We pay for clicks. We spend for conversions. And in between these two metrics we strive to understand how our keywords, text-ads, and landing pages are impacting results.

But where does the data come from?

Some of it comes from the search engines themselves. But there are other important sources too. One of the unintended consequences of picking your paid search management tool is that it defines the sources of data you’ll have access to on a daily basis.

ClickEquations uses six different data sources to provide a comprehensive look at campaign performance and rich context for reports and decision making.

Here’s a look at the data we include:

The Search Engines
The search networks collect and provide essential performance data about your account from the engine side; only the engines know how much you spent on any campaign or adgroup, your impression counts or click-through-rates, or the all-important average cost-per-click.

The search engines provide this information on their websites, and they offer API access to most but not all of it so other programs can automatically access/import this data for external use.

The API data is essential, but imperfect and incomplete. Thus far they don’t share any quality-score or minimum-bid info via the API, they don’t share the internals of all those ‘averages’, and there are a number of other metrics available in their on-site reporting systems (Google’s Impression Share being a primary example) that can’t be accessed by API.

The ClickStream
While search engine data tells you a lot about what happened on the search engine, it doesn’t tell you very much beyond the click itself - at least in their default configuration - about the behavior of searchers.

Gaining this important additional information requires adding conversion tracking tags to both website pages and target URLs. The realities of websites and the organizations that support them makes this unfortunately complicated, but it’s a struggle you really have to win to seriously manage paid search.

Both Google and Yahoo offer their own optional conversion tags. When enabled, these expands your data set to include conversion counts, conversion rates, and makes possible some simple calculations like revenue-per-click and average-order-value. (It should be said that using these tags also gives the engines more insights into the performance of your business, a fact that many companies legitimately fear.)

ClickEquations supports the search engine conversion tags, which increase the amount of data provided via the APIs.

But we also have our own ClickEquations conversion tags, which offer substantial advantages. With our conversion tags we get full conversion data on all three engines, sku-level details about sales including revenue-related info like tax and shipping costs. These tags also enable us to provide complete search query reports, and information about what users do on your website after they arrive.

We would recommend using the search engine conversion tags only if they’re already enabled and only until they can be replaced or augmented with our own tags.

Hidden Metrics
As mentioned above, not all the data the search engines have make it into their APIs. Some of that missing information is very useful.

ClickEquations integrates some of this ‘missing’ information, including our favorite - Google’s Impression Share metrics.

Impression Share tells you how often your text-ad was displayed as a percentage of the times it could have been displayed given your chosen keywords. Looking at your Impression Share, and the 3 related-metrics Google provides, is an important clue as to where your campaigns have the most unrealized potential.

Proprietary TrueMetrics
Using the data provided by the engine API’s, page tags, and other sources, we can apply mathematics and statistics to create new numbers that deliver very valuable information and insights. In ClickEquations we call these TrueMetrics.

Our initial release has a number of them.

• Some are simple ratio’s - like what percentage of your Max-Bid is your Average CPC. This turns out that’s an interesting and useful number to look at when making decisions about your keywords or ad-groups.
• Others are based on complex mathematical or statistical calculations - such as ClickShare which tells you how an ad-group or keyword is performing as compared to its potential.

Calculated Metrics
No matter how many metrics or TrueMetrics we provide, we know that nearly every search manager or business has their own unique views or needs for data - which is why with the Excel-based ClickEquations Analyst you can add user-defined calculated metrics to any reports.

In fact, we even use calculated metrics in many of our pre-built Excel report templates and dashboards. One example takes the Google Impression Share metric and combines it with our proprietary ClickShare metric to produce a ‘Potential Revenue’ metric that shows how much more revenue an Ad-Group could deliver if it were hitting its ‘full potential’ (meaning getting all possible impressions, running at position #1, and getting CTR’s equivalent to the averages of other related keywords.)

3rd-party Data Sources
Paid search doesn’t live alone in the marketing or business world. And it doesn’t have to live alone in your reports or analysis.

ClickEquations Analyst makes it possible to directly import data from virtually any other database - other marketing channels, product databases, and accounting systems, etc. - and connect it directly to your live PPC data.

This makes it possible to look at the inventory levels of items based on which keywords typically sell them, compare the performance of certain keywords between search engine and shopping engine channels, or addrich meta-data to products reports - to name but a few.

Living With Data

In carefully studying the full range of available paid search management software solutions over the past few months, I’ve been struck by how many rely solely on the search engine API data. The next largest tier supports conversion tags, either their own or those of the engines, but limits their utility by neglecting to capture full search query data or full shopping cart sku-level contents.

But limited data means limited reports. And limited reports means limited understanding. And limited understanding often means bad or at least uninformed decision making.

The power of ClickEquations comes not from having six different data sources, but from the ways in which that data is used to deliver understanding and drive better decisions. In upcoming posts we’ll revisit many of these data sources, especially the unique ones, and drill down into the uses and benefits of this information in everyday account management.