Interview with Craig Danuloff of ClickEquations
Published October 26, 2009 by Garry Przyklenk ClickEquations
The more I talk to the people at ClickEquations, the more impressed I become with their product development. I last caught up with Alex Cohen and Craig Danuloff of ClickEquations back in August at SES San Jose, believe it or not – on the advice of Avinash Kaushik. There are a ton of pay-per-click bid management vendors out there, so I sought to find out what made ClickEquations different by sitting down with Craig Danuloff, President and Founder of ClickEquations.
GP: Craig, thank you for taking the time to talk with me today about ClickEquations. I’ve seen and heard quite a bit about your product already, and have had an eye on how the product has evolved over the last 12 months or so. A lot of other vendors out there promise sophisticated bid management tools, but are hampered by poorly architected reporting systems that are often behind the market’s movement. How is ClickEquations different?
CD: 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.
Our bid management capabilities are complete – we support four different business goals and provide users a lot of detailed controls over the data our algorithms use and the way in which the recommended bids are determined and applied. But we don’t support many bidding schemes which we think are inappropriate or even dangerous – like enabling users to create cascading if/then rules that make decisions and changes based on what are essentially untested theories.
And perhaps more importantly we try to be honest with our clients about the role bidding should play and the potential it has. Our bid rules will make good decisions/recommendations based on the data available. If they’re running against Broad Match keywords getting matched to a huge range of search queries, and in Ad Groups with 4 text-ads running with really disparate CTR and conversion rates, the bids will be the best possible on the averaged data, but better keyword expansion, campaign organization, and text ad copy testing methods would drive far better results than any improved bid algorithm.
GP: And that campaign refinement then becomes the real competitive advantage for your clients, interesting. Speaking of goals and attribution, recent discussions at conferences such as SMX and SES seem to all migrate back to the problems associated with last click attribution. For one, I don’t see it as a problem, but an issue in semantics. I’m assuming last click is still an option, but what other options does CE provide marketers when reporting campaign success?
CD: We think there are benefits to looking at revenue attribution models other than Last Click, and we support Last, First, Linear, and a Weighted model. Unlike most other packages however we support them all simultaneously (GP- !), users don’t have to choose so you can actually see and compare the impact of one vs. another on individual keywords. And you can change the model used to drive your reports and it will apply retroactively.
Even more powerfully, you can define different bid rules to use different attribution models. So if you want to make bid decisions for your Brand terms of a Last Click basis, but make them for your long tail keywords on a Linear model, you can. This gives you a lot of flexibility.
GP: I’m floored by the simultaneous attribution results, that’s impressive. Needless to say, your reporting engine is also quite robust. Tell me a bit about the types of reports you can generate using ClickEquations.
CD: There are two different reporting systems. In the browser based report interface there are 40+ predefined reports, and users can customize each by adding or deleting from our dozens of metrics available in each report. These reports provide detailed looks at each level of the account from engine down to ad group to keyword to query to text ad to products sold and geography. All reports of course can be filtered by any date range or combination of metrics.
We also have an Excel Plug-in we call ClickEquations Analyst, which comes with a range of predefined dashboards and reports, each of which can be updated with a single click, or customized freely. The dashboards are rich summaries of account performance over time. The other reports include a range of deep analysis such as Quality Score or Match Type distribution, What’s Changed reports showing growth or decline in different metrics, differences in keyword performance across engines, and more.
GP: Obviously the power of your solution is the ability to pull those metrics into Excel and have them update real time. How does your Excel client compare to say, the Omniture SiteCatalyst Excel Client?
CD: It’s similar obviously. One large difference is our Quick-Change Palette, which lets users modify and refresh the queries via simple pull-down menus, without re-authoring the worksheets. This allows anyone to use these reports without having to learn the more detailed creating and authoring steps. We also made it simple for agencies to build/run reports and change between client accounts with a single click. Our reports can also be shared between clients – so if someone builds a very cool dashboard or report, they can email it to a friend who uses ClickEquations and that person can load their data in and take advantage of the report instantly.
Another difference is something we call ‘Delta Reports’. Often in PPC what you want to know is the top 10 (or 100) of something based on the magnitude of the change between two time periods. So for example I might want to know the difference in my cost for a keyword between the first week of this month and first week of last month. A special data set we make available via Analyst lets you access this result without having to pull down all the data and do the comparisons yourself. It’s a huge time saver that enables all kinds of cool analysis that would otherwise be essentially impossible.
GP: Seeing the Excel client in action at the show was eye-opening, it’s amazing how feature-rich the ClickEquations Analyst is, compared to competitive products out there. Is that due in part to Avinash Kaushik having had a hand in designing the reporting aspects of ClickEquations. I’m interested if you could share a little insight into how he contributed to the end product as it stands today.
CD: Avinash is on our Advisory Board. We talk to Avinash on a regular basis, to share ideas and get feedback. These whole concept of our Delta feature and the specific reports in which it is used – our What’s Changed Reports for example, were based on ideas that came from our conversations with him. Our next major release has some really fundamental new ideas that came from these Avinash brainstorming sessions.
GP: Now, having seen some of the reporting already, I can certainly comment that including a metric like impression share is huge. Please describe how you achieve this metric, whether it’s simply pulled from the AdWords API or whether it’s calculated, or maybe both? What other goodies are in the pipeline that you might be able to share?
CD: Unfortunately Google doesn’t offer Impression Share in the API, so we have to work for that one. We do use their core data and do some interpolations on it when users request reports over different date ranges. We also have a range of proprietary metrics – like our ClickShare and ClickVariance which let clients know when there is room for improvement in their CTR’s or a need to split the keywords in their Ad Groups up into smaller campaigns, respectively.
Without sharing too much, I’d suggest that there are many areas where paid search managers could still use better data than is generally available today. Quality Score is a topic we focus on a lot, and yet many of the factors which contribute to it can’t be seen in any interface today. That seems like a problem someone should solve.
GP: Since ClickEquations is an advanced paid search platform, it must integrate into an analytics package at some point. Are agencies/advertisers required to install conversion scripts on their sites, or does ClickEquations integrate directly with popular web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Omniture, Webtrends, Yahoo, etc?
CD: We use our own page tags to allow the most complete and accurate data collection about the user and their behavior on our client sites. This feeds our very complete search query reports (for all three engines), our ability to report on performance by user geography, and the ability to report on conversions down to the SKU.
There are many interesting reasons to integrate with analytics data, and we can do that via our Analyst tool, but in our opinion importing conversion data from analytics has too many limitations in terms of data accuracy and completeness. ClickEquations is based on a level of reporting that just wouldn’t be possible with the limitations of imported conversions.
GP: Great point, and certainly one area where you stand out from competitive products.
So with that, I want to thank Craig Danuloff once again for taking the time to sit down and answer my questions. If you’re interested in learning more about a very powerful pay-per-click bid management solution, make sure visit ClickEquations to read more about their product, or check out their white papers and videos.
About ClickEquations
ClickEquations is a complete paid search platform designed for large advertisers and agencies. ClickEquations helps scale and optimize paid search spend with automated analytics, flexible bid management and intuitive campaign editing. Built-in guidance helps clients identify and act on areas of opportunity and loss.
ClickEquations Analyst, a unique Excel plug-in, offers unlimited customization of sharable reports and dashboards as well as unprecedented analytics power.
Founded in 2006 and located outside of Philadelphia, Penn., ClickEquations is venture-capital backed and run by a seasoned management team.
Tags: alex cohen, avinash kaushik, campaign attribution, craig danuloff, excel plugin, ppc bid management
