Introducing One-Click Segmentation in ClickEquations

Managing paid search accounts is in many ways an exercise in prioritization. There are endless opportunities to expand and refine your account, run reports and analyze data, or make changes and conduct tests. The only limits are hours in the day, and days in the week. But not everything you might spend time on is equally valuable, or even has equal potential. So we thought ClickEquations should make it easy to find and focus on critical aspects of your PPC accounts. That’s why we’ve added four new ‘One-Click Segmentation’ features to ClickEquations V2 which went live last week:

• One-Click Brand Keyword Segmentation
• One-Click Head Keyword Segmentation
• One-Click Content Network Segmentation
• One-Click Custom-User-Defined Segmentation

Each of these enables you to quickly isolate the performance history and then take action on important subsets of your account.

Brand Keywords Are Special

As discussed in our ‘Success Through Negative Brand Keywords‘ post last week, keywords that contain your brand terms and phrases are distinct from your non-brand keywords, and in many ways they should be managed differently. But many accounts still have brand keywords scattered across many ad groups and campaigns. Wouldn’t it be great to see them all (and nothing else) with just a click? Now you can. Just choose ‘Brand Keywords Only’ from the Filters and Views menu. You’ll near-instantly be presented with a list of all the brand keywords in your account. You can review their performance and make any necessary changes. You can even create and apply additional custom filters to run on your brand-only keywords.

Head Keywords Are Special Too

The concept of ‘head’ and ‘tail’ has got a lot of press in the last year. And we all know that a relatively small percentage of our keywords earn the lion’s share of our revenue and consume the lions share of our cost. This has lots of implications for paid search, but most important is the fact that most of us don’t allocate our relatively precious resource, time, in proportion to the results various keywords produce. In other words, we don’t spend enough time fishing where the fish are. Wouldn’t it be great to click that mouse of yours and see only that small segment of keywords that are driving the vast majority of your revenue? Or clicks? Or costs? Now you can. Just choose ‘Head Keywords Only’ from the Filters and Views menu. You even get to control the definition of ‘Head Keyword’ that you wish to use. You set the target percentage, the key metric, and the lookback period. The results are amazing. For the account we use for demonstrations – which is a real working paid search account with about 170K keywords in AdWords, just 281 drive 80% of the revenue. Those are an important 281 keywords to focus on, which is the point of this feature.

Content is not Search

We’ve also recently discussed on this blog the distinctions between search advertising and content network advertising. Given those thoughts, it makes sense that we’d support easy segmentation of search and content within ClickEquations. So now we do. Just choose Search Network or Content Network from the Filters and Views menu. Any campaigns that aren’t in the group you’ve chosen, will disappear. You can review results, navigate freely, and make any additions or changes. Most importantly, you can focus. You can think about the campaigns in terms of the distribution network. And not get confused or distracted by the entirely different numbers that come from other network type.

Custom Saved Filters

The one-click access to brand keywords, head keywords, and search or content campaigns is a great start towards making it easier to focus on what’s important within your paid search accounts. But in the complication of paid search, there are many other segments you may also want to access quickly.So we’ve also added very powerful named and saved filters. You can define nearly any combination of account structural elements (like ad group or keyword attributes) plus performance results (such as click-through rates or quality scores) and status flags (including paused or disapproved) and even timeframes within which elements were modified. Then just enter a name and save it for easy future application. These filters can be used anywhere in the account – they’re smart enough to ignore irrelivant settings – so if you define CPC as one of the factors and you’re viewing ad groups, the ‘CPC’ will be ignored but the other aspects will still apply. We all have many ways we like to slice and dice our campaigns or keywords – and now you can do so quickly and easily.

Intelligent Paid Search Management

We think there are many ways that paid search management software can transform the process of managing ppc accounts. The tools have to evolve beyond simply offering option-after-option and begin shaping the way the work is done. We think both our best practices and the one-click segmentation features of ClickEquations V2 are great steps in that direction. Both start the shift towards ‘what you should do’ and ‘how you could do it’. For practitioners who take advantage of them, we believe they’re both time savers and clear ways to improve results. Avinash has said that “Segmenting your data is the fastest way to finding actionable insights from your web analytics data.” You can read some of his thoughts on it here and here. We think segmenting your data is one of the best ways to prioritize too. Spend some time in ClickEquations V2, and we think you’ll agree.