Recently we’ve done interviews with some of our favorite PPC bloggers, and some of the results are now live online.

The first is with Greg Meyers, who recently published Part-I of a discussion of Paid search: art or science?

An Excerpt:

“There is a truth to the way the search engines work, and there is an approach to managing paid search that aligns with this truth. It’s knowable and provable and repeatable. It seems that many of the so-called ideologies out there lack this grounding. The church of ‘keyword expansion’ for example tends to lack a grasp of how keyword matching really works. The church of ‘position 1 or 2′ fails the math test. The church of ‘relevance’ or ‘holistic’ is the most faith-based of them all.There’s no substitute for sharp strategy in PPC. Which segments should you target? Which products should you promote first? Should you build out the search network or the content network first? That kind of planning is based in good data, but your own human intuition and experience still have to rule.” Read the entire interview…

The next was with Garry Przyklenk of PPC-Advice, where we discuss bid management, revenue attribution, and paid search reporting.

An Excerpt:

“We would agree with your premise that the data driving a whole range of assumptions about both bid management tools and their use is generally inadequate.  Beyond that, the role of bidding within campaigns is generally misunderstood.  People seem to wish bidding would cure or resolve a huge range of issues that it can’t and won’t.  And some vendors seem willing to feed into that desire.  When you combine these two issues you get a lot of poorly designed bidding solutions pretending that they’re PPC cure-alls.  It’s a sorry state of affairs.” Read the entire interview…

Thanks to Greg and Garry for their time and interest.

If you’ve got a PPC blog and would like to talk about PPC, or review ClickEquations, let us know!

PS: If you like these, here’s one from a few month ago with Manoj Jasra at WebAnalyticsWorld.

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Quality Score is just as important at keywords and bids in PPC, but isn’t nearly as well understood. In this webinar you’ll find thorough explanation of what Quality Score is, what it means and how you can improve yours.

If you like the webinar, check out our Quality Score white paper.

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But the truth is that keywords are just a means to an end; they’re little magnets sent out there to attract search queries. And if you’re only able to review reports and make decisions at a keyword level, you’re not getting a very accurate or informative picture of what’s really happening in your account – so you’re almost certainly making bad decisions and not optimizing your results.”

That’s a snipped of the Craig Danuloff’s interview with Josh Dreller, paid search columnist at Search Engine Land and VP at Fuor Digital, on the topic of query mining. He covers a broad range of questions:

• Where can an SEM pro go to find search query data?
• Why did you invest so much time into building query reports into ClickEquations?
• Why do you hate Broad Match so much?
• I’m supportive of your suggestion of an Include match type. Can you sum up your thoughts on this for the readers?
• What is the best way to organize search queries to gather insights for optimization?
• What are some best practices to utilize once you’ve analyzed the query data?

Check out the full article.

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1. Search Query Webinar Recording & Another Key Tip If you missed our recent webinar, Master Search Queries to...

Of course, a lot of folks had their training budgets cut due to the economy. Thus, I present our virtual conference: 5 Videos to Boost Your Paid Search. It includes a recording of our latest webinar, “Marketing During A Recession: From Pre-Click to Post-Click” with Bryan Eisenberg of FutureNow and David Brussin of Monetate.

If you like these, join us on Thursday, September 24th for our free SEMPO webinar: Quality Score in High Resolution.

Marketing During a Recession: From Pre-Click to Post-Click

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Master Search Queries to Decrease Cost and Increase Conversions

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PPC Analytics Tips from Avinash Kaushik

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High Resolution PPC

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Quality Score: The Secret Factor in PPC Success

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Don’t forget to sign up for our free SEMPO webinar: Quality Score in High Resolution.

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First, we’ll be at OMMA in New York City, with a booth at the OMMA Global Show. Stop by to say hello or catch a demo of ClickEquations.

Mid-week, ClickEquations CEO Lucinda Holt will be in Las Vegas at Shop.org. No booth for us this year, but if you’ll be there and would like to talk, contact us at info@clickequations.com and we’ll set something up.

On Weds and Thursday I’ll be in Los Angeles at the PPC-Summit. I’m speaking on Weds afternoon about Strategies and Tactics for AdWords.

If you want to get some advanced PPC training I think the two day event will be great. To arrange a discussion or meeting while I’m on the west coast – shoot us an email (info@clickequations.com) and we’ll set something up.

Of none of these shows match your travel plans, SMX-East is just a few weeks away…

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Even if they had a lot of impressions and a good number of clicks, it’s been hard to cut them loose, due to the nagging thought that ‘if they were only up higher, those better converting people would click them and everything would be alright.”

Or so we (at least I) always thought.

But as I was staring at a long list of keywords over the weekend, pondering bid strategies (yes, I know how to have fun) it occurred to me that Google’s recent claim that conversion rate don’t vary (much) by position should take this worry away. There really aren’t a higher class of frequent buyers to meet higher up the page.

It’s still a little hard to believe. But I’m trying.

For background on all this, check out the article I wrote on SearchEngineLand discussing the recent Google announcement.

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On September 16, Craig Danuloff (ClickEquations President & Founder) will join experts Bryan Eisenberg of FutureNow and David Brussin of Monetate for a free webinar: Recession Marketing: From Pre-Click to Post-Click

Date: September 16, 2009. Time: Noon, EDT.
The webinar is free but space is limited so if you plan to attend we encourage you to register now.

What You Will Learn

This webinar will help you to synchronize your efforts, from traffic acquisition, through the sales funnel, to closing. You’ll get advice from experts and company founders including:

• How persona marketing works, from end-to-end, even when times are tough
• Practical tips for using your existing analytics data to assess what segmented marketing can do for your bottom line
• Why there’s never been a better time to steal market share from your competitors

The Experts

• Craig Danuloff will explain SEM techniques for targeting profitable customers via search campaign design and deep analytics.
• David Brussin will present the art and science of deriving and acting upon persona information in the post-click experience.
• Bryan Eisenberg will discuss how “recession marketing” can steal market share from your competitors in this challenging economy.

Register Now

Registration is free. Please click here to register online. If you have any questions about our webinars, please contact us.

About the Presenters

• Bryan Eisenberg: Chief Persuasion Officer and Co-founder, Future Now, Inc. Bryan is the author of several marketing bestsellers, including: Call to Action; Waiting For Your Cat To Bark; and Always Be Testing.
• Craig Danuloff: President and Founder of ClickEquations, Inc. Craig is a leading expert on pay per click marketing and a frequent speaker at industry events such as SMX.
• David Brussin: CEO and Co-founder of Monetate, Inc. David is an author and experienced public speaker who works with leading edge e-retailers to perfect post-click marketing strategies.

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Last week Mr Varian spoke again, this time on the AdWords blog, but with equal import. He shared the fact that his team had studied the impact of position on conversion rate, and found that conversion rates were about the same no matter if your ads are run in position 1 or position 8.

Today SearchEngineLand published an article I wrote concerning the importance of this revelation.

While the video shared new truths that helped our understanding of Quality Score, this new information has impact almost entirely on bidding.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working to really understand bidding – I’ll admit it’s not something I’ve focused on before because it always seemed vastly over-rated as a factor in paid search success. I still believe bidding gets more than it’s share of attention in the PPC world, but for very different reasons than in the past.

Bidding is probably the most misunderstood component in a system full of misunderstood components. This is true because we bring assumptions about the role of bidding in an auction which turn out to be true in the modified ‘auction’ that Google and the other engines run.

The result is often wasted money, but more often it is deliberate actions which have virtually no chance of accomplishing their objectives. We change bids as if raising them will push our keywords up and lowering them will drop them down. The problem is it’s not that simple.

As the the SearchEngineLand article describes, Mr. Varian is doing us all a huge favor by clarifying how various elements of the AdWords auction and system really work. But we’ve got a long way to go…

Our New Facebook Page is looking for fans! If you’re a serious paid search marketer and enjoy this blog or like ClickEquations, please ‘fan up’ by clicking the button in the Facebook widget in the far right column.

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Some highlights:

[Manoj]: Give us a brief description of what ClickEquations does and some of its greatest benefits

[Alex Cohen]: ClickEquations is the tool we dreamed of having years ago when we managed paid search accounts directly using other tools or working directly in the engine interfaces….We know the frustration of not being able to get the data you need, of slow reporting interfaces, and of the frustrating multi-step (and often multi-tool) repetitive processes that fill the days of many PPC professionals. Our old pet peeves are directly responsible for the best features in ClickEquations. (Read The Complete Answer.)

[Manoj]: ClickEquations is known for its slick interface, so what makes your interface so good

[Alex Cohen]: The most frequent comment we get from people who see us at trade shows or on our weekly webinars is “it’s so clear you guys really understand ppc”. There are all kinds of large and small aspects of our interface and product that come from our deep practical experience in the space…. The other thing about our interface is that we realize the importance of context. Most tools seem to developed with the goal of replicating the AdWords or AdWords Editor interface, supporting three engines, and then adding a few bells and whistles. We think this is a fundamentally flawed approach. (Read The Complete Answer.)

[Manoj]: How does attribution fit into your solution?

[Alex Cohen]: This is a great example of where a lack of the right data and clear access to it can really make it hard to make smart paid search decisions…Yet the conversion tracking features from the search engines and most analytics and even paid search tools, give 100% revenue credit to the last keyword… ClickEquations supports four attribution models so our users can both choose how they want to distribute revenue among keywords and more importantly see and make choices based on the differences. (Read The Complete Answer.)

[Manoj]: Tell us a little bit about some of your product specific metrics such as ClickShare and ClickVariance

[Alex Cohen]: Part of our quest for clear detailed data produced the not-so-surprising realization that the search engines aren’t telling us everything we’d like to know. A lot of what they keep private is data that only they have, but some of it is buried in all the data they do provide… We have developed a series of proprietary metrics that offer additional information and insights to our clients. ClickShare and ClickVariance are two of them. (Read The Complete Answer.)

Our thanks to Manoj for covering ClickEquations on his popular blog. If anyone has follow-up questions, post them in the comments here or at Web Analytics World and we’ll chime in with answers.

Our New Facebook Page is looking for fans! If you’re a serious paid search marketer and enjoy this blog or like ClickEquations, please ‘fan up’ by clicking the button in the Facebook widget in the far right column.

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• OMMA Global New York
  OMMA Global New York is the premiere online media, marketing, and advertising expo spanning two days of serious talks and discussions from the very best in the industry.
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  ClickEquations is the exclusive sponsor of OMMA Search, the series of pannels during OMMA Global. We’ll also be answering questions and doing demos in the expo hall. Stop by booth 314.
  .
  Use the code OMMAGCEDISC to get a discount on registration. Register here.
  • September 21-22, 2009
  • New York Marriott Marquis
    1535 Broadway
    New York, New York 10036
    Telephone 212-398-1900

• Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East
  SMX East attracts the best and brightest in the search community. It’s programmed by Danny Sullivan and the team at Search Engine Land. You’ll learn all things search marketing and have fun at great networking parties.
  .
  Use the discount code smx10clickequations when you register for the conference
  • October 5-7, 2009
  • Jacob K. Javits Convention Center
    655 West 34th Street
    New York, NY 10001

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Site-Links have existed in organic listings for popular and high ranking sites for some time. According to Google their appearance in AdWords is just ‘yet another test’:

As part of our ongoing commitment to help users find the information they’re looking for online, we are testing a feature in which links to various pages of an advertiser’s website may appear within the text ads on Google.com. Presenting multiple landing page options is intended to make specific website information such as gift registries, special deals, store locators and the like more easily accessible to users. It also offers brand marketers a new way to quickly engage potential customers. This feature is currently in a limited beta with a small number of advertisers.

It’s an interesting idea, which we could imagine helping some Broad Match keywords quite a bit. On the other hand, imagine having to test different link combinations within each ad, and trying to track the various conversion rates on each of the landing pages. Or maybe Google will automatically select the appropriate pages based on the search query of the user?

Tests like this often come and go and are never heard from again. It will be interesting to see what happens with this one.

Hat Tip to SEO-RoundTable and Darrin Ward who originally discovered this test.

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This is a feature of the core ClickEquations reporting screen, and shows all queries from all search engines by keyword and match type.

There is a related ClickEquations Analyst Report that makes use of this data in a very powerful way.

It’s called the ‘Unique Queries Per Keyword’ report. It counts the number of different queries that the search engines are matching to each of your keywords, and presents them sorted by the number of queries.

On the list above for example, the keyword ‘dog remedy’ in Broad Match was matched by Google to 528 different search queries. Yowsa!

If a keyword is being matched to over 500 different search queries, two things are almost certainly true:

• There are some pretty unrelated search queries in there that have to be avoided with negatives
• There are dozens of new phrase and exact match keywords that need to be added to better attack these queries.

This of course is how we generally use the search query report, but with this prioritized view we can quickly find the keywords where keyword negatives and expansion is critically needed. Every negative we add saves us money. Every keyword we add in this way has multiple benefit, especially those using phrase and exact match types. Each can be expected to:

• Increase our Impression Share by expand the pool of queries to which we’ll be matched
• Improve Quality Score by by increasing relevance and increasing number of times query exactly matches keyword
• Enables us to bid to the value of each keyword rather than once for whole broad group
• If we do get increased Quality Score on specific Keywords, our CPC could/should be lower on those queries.

In summary, there are lots of advantages to a more detailed keyword build-out when it’s driven by actual queries not random speculation.

Finding Keyword Expansion Ideas
To find out which keywords we need to add to both our keyword and negative lists, we can jump back into the ClickEquations application and find all the queries that Google matched to ‘dog remedy’.

Likely negatives would be words for illnesses that we don’t sell product for – dysplasia, pancreatitis, rabies, etc. Areas for expansion are those which come up a lot – mange, itching, and vomiting seam like winners in this area – to name a few.

Highly specific words clarify intent – which gets a lot of press in the ‘long tail’ discussion of keyword expansion. The same is true on the negative side: highly specific words can verify incompatible intent.

Bulk Importing Keywords and Negatives
Since it looks like we may want to add a lot of new keywords and negatives, we can jump back into ClickEquations Analyst and pull the full query list into Excel, make a few edits, and then bulk import that edited list back into ClickEquations.

Squash The Broad Match
Our Match Type Keyword Trap white paper discusses how you should use match types to take control of your search queries back from the search engines.

Using the capabilities described above to quickly find the keywords where broad match (and to a lessor degree phrase match) is running out-of-control is a great first step towards taking back control, saving yourself some money, and expanding the reach of your account.

Like This Post? You can be a ClickEquations Facebook Fan! Just click in the widget in the far right column.

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If you’re a paid search manager, ClickEquations user, future ClickEquations user, regular reader of this blog, or otherwise interested – we’d appreciate it if you’d sign up as a ‘Fan’ both to share your interest with the world and so that we have another way to keep in touch.

You can click the ‘Become A Fan’ button in the Facebook Fans widget in our right-hand sidebar, or search for ClickEquations on Facebook at become a fan there.

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We’ve jetted across the country to exhibit at Search Engine Strategies San Jose. Stop by booth #721 in the expo hall to catch a demo or chat with the ClickEquations team, including President & Founder Craig Danuloff.

We’ll also be at SearchBash on Tuesday and the Internet Marketers Charity Party on Wednesday. Check @clickequations on Twitter for the latest updates.

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We soon heard from customers that you wanted to do more – export all keywords in a campaign or even from all campaigns in a single search engine account.

In our July release we added this capability – now which you choose the ‘export’ button you’ll get a dialog box asking if you want just the keywords from the current ad group, or all the keywords from the current campaign or search engine account.

For now, you have to dive into one ad group to find the ‘export’ button. Next release we’ll move the button up to appear at the campaign and engine levels too.

After you’ve done your bulk editing in excel, save the file back out as .CSV or Excel 2003 format, and then you can import it back into ClickEquations. The bulk import dialog box accepts keywords from any number of campaigns and ad groups within a single file.

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