paid

This is a guest post from Alex Cohen, Senior Marketing Manager at ClickEquations.

People tend to think of paid search through the lens of keywords: You pick keywords, bid on keywords and figure out which keywords are good and bad.

Searchers, the people you’re trying to reach, don’t type in keywords. They type in search queries. The keywords you purchase and match types you choose, along with your bids and Quality Score, determine how many search queries you get exposed to. The relevance of your text ad determines how many click.

That relationship between search queries, keywords and text ads is one of the truths of paid search. But, analyzing that relationship is actually very cumbersome with most paid search tools. There’s one report for keywords, another for search queries and yet another for text ads. You, the analyst or paid search manager, are left to do the heavy lifting to stitch the pieces together in order to target the right queries with the right message.

Connecting these pieces is a technology problem and one that we at ClickEquations have solved with our latest feature, Keyword Zoom.

Keyword Zoom makes it possible look inside the performance of any keyword and directly manipulate the queries that have driven up cost or lifted revenue and tune the relationship between those queries and specific ad copy.

Keyword Zoom allows you to see:

The search queries that the keyword attracted and how each performed
The ad copy that was shown to the people who entered these queries
Complete performance statistics and metrics for that keyword

You can easily:

Turn a search query into a new negative keyword so don’t waste money on irrelevant search queries
Add a search query as a new keyword of any match type to attract more searches like that, boosting sales
Edit existing ad copy or create new ads or variations to improve the alignment of queries to text ads

“Paid search advertisers bid on keywords but money is actually spent and earned on search queries.” said Craig Danuloff, President. “Keyword management is no longer enough. Only by looking inside the performance of any keyword, and mining search queries to stop ineffective clicks and increase targeting can accounts truly be optimized in today’s competitive and expensive PPC marketplace. Keyword Zoom is the first and only tool that brings keywords, search queries, text ads and detailed analytics data into one screen with editing tools. It’s the best way to target the best prospects with the most relevant message.”

Keyword Zoom is integrated directly into the ClickEquations paid search platform, which enables full reporting, editing, optimization and automation of PPC campaigns.

Watch this video to see Keyword Zoom in action:

When to use paid and free analytics services

Guest Author: Justin Kistner, Webtrends

Recently there have been several stories trying to understand when to use paid solutions over free solutions like Google Analytics. One post was talking about Google’s Achilles Heel referring to the fact that they don’t identify individual visitors. Another was a question asking “When is Google not enough?” From our most recent launch we saw two stories comparing us to Google: Google Eat your Heart Out and Webtrends steals Google’s lunch money and spits in its face.

We wanted to take a moment to offer some insights into the decision on whether to use a free or paid service. The truth is, it’s not us vs. Google. We like Google! Their free service has spread the power of analytics to a much broader audience, which has helped businesses understand more about what analytics is and how it can help them. While we’re both in the analytics market, we don’t necessarily serve the same customers. To help clarify, let’s take a closer look at some of the factors that determines whether or not to use a paid analytics service.

Tracking visitors

All analytics tracks visitors in aggregate, but it’s tracking them in detail that is the deciding factor. If you’re wanting to connect an individual’s site behavior with your CRM profile, you’ll need to look at paid solutions. If you want to integrate with your data warehouse or a marketing automation solution, then you’ll need a paid solution. If you’re just getting started in analytics and don’t have budget, time, or program maturity to track individual customers; then Google Analytics might be right for you.

Privacy

Some companies (and government) want to keep their data inside their firewall. Google Analytics is a SaaS offering and isn’t available as an on-premise software solution, which is also true for most of the paid solutions in the analytics space. If data privacy is a requirement for your business, you’ll need to look at on premise software solutions, some of which are free. Google does offer Urchin Analytics, which is available for download and installation on premise.

Data sampling

Google is used to handling large amounts of data. Gmail, for example, has a 7GB limit. Most users won’t use that much space. Shoot, many users can’t dream of how you could use that much space. Similarly, Google Analytics has data threshold limits and then starts to sample data. If capturing all of your data is important and you have a high volume of data, then you should look at solutions that don’t sample data. Many paid analytics services sample data as well, so this factor isn’t about paid vs. free.

So why are people recently comparing Webtrends to Google then?

Comparisons to Google make sense because we both offer analytics. More recently, the comparisons have been drawn because of our new interface. Clean, intuitive interfaces in analytics were a standard set by Google. Now that enterprise vendors like us are developing better UIs, it makes sense that people would draw comparisons to the standard.

Final thoughts

It bears mentioning here, that most people just want basic stats for their blogs or small business websites. Even some larger businesses that do not use the web as a primary business driver might not need more than Google can offer. If someone is trying to figure out if a free service will work for them, they probably aren’t a good fit for Enterprise analytics. For reference, our customers are looking to build an enterprise measurement strategy that scales and meets sophisticated business needs. It isn’t technology issues, it is sophistication/maturity of your needs and being able to get the high touch services you need to grow your business. If that sounds like your needs, then you should consider paid Enterprise analytics.