ClickEquations Blog
A Weblog on Paid Search Marketing, Search Analytics, and Online Marketing
Video: Growth & Decline Report in ClickEquations Analyst
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.
Quality Score Analysis
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.
Quality Score and First Page Bid – Now in ClickEquations
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!
Paid Search Campaign Winners & Losers
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.
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