ClickEquations is a soon-to-be-released paid search analytics and management platform. It was built by a team of experienced paid search professionals who believed that in order to deliver better results they needed a deeper and more accurate view of PPC campaigns, faster and more flexible reporting capabilities, and more extensive algorithmic automation.
Search Data
A good example of typically ‘hard-to-find’ information ClickEquations delivers is complete search query reporting. The search query is the actual word or phrase a person types into the search engine, and in PPC it is matched with a purchased keyword to trigger the display of the text-ad. The search engines themselves, and most existing paid search tools, don’t report each search query and connect it directly to the keyword, match type, click, and conversion.
So you’re paying for clicks based on what people type and how those phrases are matched to your keywords but you aren’t shown that relationship. When displayed in a simple report, you see exactly where you should add negative keywords, change match types, or modify bids which are important money saving/making changes.
On the revenue side of the transaction, ClickEquations supports true profit & ROI reporting based on the actual margin of each item sold. Most people today are limited to the return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) metric. Unfortunately, ROAS doesn’t necessarily indicate whether an adgroup or keyword is profitable. When you can see whether you’re making money or not, you can make much better decisions managing your campaigns and keywords.
ClickEquations also provides new insights into your search campaigns with proprietary metrics that can help you see opportunities or problems in your ad-groups. One example is ClickShare, a new metric that tells you the percentage of clicks your ads missed due to their position or sub-par CTR performance. It’s a logical extension of Google’s Impression Share metric – and when the two are combined the software is able to show you a good approximation of the impressions, clicks, and revenue being left on the table for each of your campaigns and ad-groups.
Reports & Dashboards
The highlight of the browser based reporting in ClickEquations is speed – you can switch between reports or filter on date ranges or particular ad-groups very quickly.
But ClickEquations Analyst – an Excel Plug-in – takes the reporting capabilities even further. Analyst lets you integrate live PPC data within any Excel worksheet – no more .cvs file importing. You can refresh the data with just a click, easily modify date ranges or other data filters.
ClickEquations ships with ready-to-use operator reports and management dashboards. You can modify or customize any of these, or create new ones from scratch.
These reports and dashboards can be shared between ClickEquations users as templates. If you create a cool new way to look at keyword performance, you can share it with a friend or add it to the public ClickEquations template library. When another ClickEquations user opens the excel file the template is populated with their account data.
Management, Testing, Automation
Rich data and flexible reporting both help paid search managers to make better decisions about how to enhance their campaigns. ClickEquations makes many recommendations explicit with ‘quick-win’ guidance reports that highligh opportunities and campaign problems. Advanced bid algorithms make sure you’re not paying too much or too little.
And text-ads, a very important and under-managed component in paid search campaign success, benefit from a true multivariate testing capability. The user defines three possible ad titles, line 1 and line 2 candidates, and ClickEquations automatically completes testing to determine the most effective ad based on either a click-through-rate or conversion rate goals.
Summary
ClickEquations was built based on the belief that paid search managers don’t currently have the information and tools they need to be truely efficient or effective. This release is the first in a series aimed at changing how PPC professionals spend their time and deliver great results to their clients or managers.
ClickEquations is currently being used to manage paid search accounts for OfficeMax, Liz Claiborne, The Franklin Mint, and others. The software officially becomes available in November, but a limited number of free Charter accounts are available – you can request one at ClickEquations.com.
