April 2011 Release Notes

Our April 2011 ClickEquations release was mostly devoted to ‘under the hood’ updates and upgrades, but we did add a few new user facing features which are now live in your account.

The April 2011 release includes:

• Google 2011 API Support
• New Text Ad Zoom
• New Profit Per Impression Metric
• Improved Bid Suggest in Manager
• Improved Conversion Options for Bid Rules

Feature Details

Google 2011 API Support

ClickEquations communicates bi-directionally to each of the major search engines via their published API’s. Google recently begin the move to a new 2011 API and we’ve now completed a major upgrade to the technical infrastructure in ClickEquations. This new API assures us future compatibility and enables support for new capabilities we’ll be adding in future releases.

New Text Ad Zoom

One of the keys to managing text ads is to know when CTR or conversion data can be trusted to make decisions around pausing or rewriting text ads. The new Text Ad Zoom feature enables you to zoom in on any text ad to get statistical confidence levels for the current date range.

The feature is accessed much like the existing Keyword Zoom. Just select any text ad in Manager, and click the Zoom icon. The Text Ad Zoom dialog box then appears, showing you the best performing ad in that ad group, plus a statistical analysis of the performance of all of the other ads. You can review performance based on CTR or Conversion rate. The Confidence column tells you if the reported metrics are statistically significant – answering the important question “Can I make a decision based on this data?”

New Profit Per Impression Metric

Advertisers typically judge text ads by click-through rate or conversion rate. But what about ads that get a great click-through rate but a low conversion rate? Or those that get very few clicks but nearly always convert?

With the Profit-Per-Impression (PPI) metric, which is now available for every text ad in ClickEquations, you can see the blended results of CTR and Conversion rate performance and therefore make better decisions about which ads are helping your business.

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Improved Bid Suggest in Manager

We’ve made it easier than ever to take advantage of the bid management algorithms and rules in ClickEquations. Pending bid suggestions are now visible in the keyword tab in manager, and in the edit keyword palette so you can quickly accept or modify them. Just make the Bid Suggestion and Bid Suggest % columns visible in the keyword tab of Manager using the Customize Columns feature, then sort by Bid Suggestion – you can quickly see the results produced by all the bid rules currently running in your account. Select any keyword and use the edit palette to accept or modify the suggested bid and update your bids in the engine.

Improved Conversion Options for Bid Rules

When defining bid rules, you now have the option of using your default revenue roll-up settings, or customizing the combination of internal and external conversion events that any given bid rule will rely on for data. It’s a small change that makes it faster and easier to create new bid rules and help ensure that the correct data is used for every bid calculation.