Listen to Alex Cohen Interview

Marketing Manager at ClickEquations Alex Cohen Shares Search Strategy with Siftable

James Green: Hi Alex.

Alex Cohen: Hi James, how are you?

James: Great. I appreciate you taking time out of your day to do this.

Alex Cohen: My pleasure.

James: Again, I’ve heard great things about your presentation at SMX. I hope you’re recovering from that.

Alex Cohen: It’s nice to know I’m not talking to myself.

James: Can you start by telling me a little bit about yourself?

Alex Cohen: Sure. I’ve been at Click Equations for three years. We have a unique background; we actually started as an agency. We had a classic buy vs. build process and that’s how we ended up getting into the software space. When I joined, we were still offering some services that we don’t offer anymore. My role was as an analyst, and then a strategist, and an account manager, and a multivariate tester, and now I’m running marketing—so it’s a typical start-up career path.

James: That’s great. What are one or two things that you’re doing at ClickEquations that you feel sets you apart as a company?

Alex Cohen: I think having that background in paid search gives us a unique perspective in the marketplace among our competitors. Because we have been in the shoes of our practitioners, we really understand a lot of the challenges. I think the three biggest challenges are: first, visibility, getting good data and good data in the right place. The second is prioritization, which is making sure you know the things you should focus on and do, as opposed to the many, many tactics you could also go out on your own. The third thing is simplification and automation— once you actually know what to do and want to do it, how does this software make the process more simple? So, a couple of the features that really excite me are: first, the ClickEquations Analyst, which is our Excel plug-in. Having been a web analyst, I know the pain of pulling CSVs and formatting reports and reporting Mondays—and also having to deal with canned reports. Many tools try to fit you into their mold instead of adapting to your business model. I really appreciate the power of that tool to automate some of the tedious tasks (which was part of the point of my presentation in London) and none of that gathering adds value to you or your client. It’s a huge leap forward in cutting out the wasteful steps. The second big piece that I really, really love in our tool is intelligence. There are things that the software is better at doing than a human. A good example is sifting through data, teasing out areas that need time and attention, and bringing them to your attention. Instead of you needing to find the meaningful segments, our software can bring them to you. Keywords that have a low quality score, campaigns that are missing impressions because they have a low budget or something is going wrong with performance. The software does a much better job than any human can because it’s just reaching tasks. When it comes to increasing your bottom line, it’s all about you spending time on the smart stuff—strategy and optimization—and using a tool to automate and simplify a lot of the other stuff.

James: I had a chance to see those when we did the demo about a week and a half ago, and I was very impressed, especially with the Analyst section that again, allows you to do a lot of the reporting and allows you to do it very dynamically. I think that’s great, and I definitely agree that that’s something you’re doing that sets you apart. Moving to the next question, what do you see as the next big problem in search and how do you hope Click Equations will be able to provide a solution to that problem?

Alex Cohen: That’s a really great question. I write for Search Engine Watch, and I don’t really write about tactics so much as I write about industry as a whole and the trends. I think one the biggest trends I see is Google, who kind of portrays search advertising as simple, it’s kind of like “five minutes, you buy your keywords, and you’ll appear in your search results.” But anybody who’s doing it on a massive scale knows that there are so many intricacies out there. What I find is that they’ve started to layer on a lot more tools for free, right, it’s great—you get all these tools for free. But there’s an opportunity cost associated with that, which is the tools they offer and the way they present data and the options they give you are oriented around what’s convenient for the search engines, what makes sense for them. You get a benefit too, but it’s designed with an opportunity path to Adwords. It’s going to show you keywords to buy, which may or may not be relevant to you. It’s never going to show you “these are the keywords you should turn off” because that doesn’t serve their purposes. There are some non-Google tools out there that are more about a fancy layer showing you what’s convenient for the search engines. I think there’s an inter-relationship between elements of paid search and how we manage paid search that isn’t well illustrated today. I’ll give you a small example. As an industry, we focus a lot on keywords, you know, buying keywords and optimizing keywords. The reality is keywords are sort of overblown; they’re just a tool you use in combination with a bid and a match type to attract search queries, which is the actual phrase somebody is typing. That relationship between the search query and the keyword and the text ad is one of the most important relationships for targeting the right people, paying the right price for those people, and effectively satisfying them with a text ad on the landing page so they’ll convert. There isn’t anything in Adwords that helps you manage that process. There’s nothing that shows you that relationship and helps you make smarter decisions about valuing and targeting based on that relationship. And that’s an example of how tools like ours can help you think about how search really works and innovate and offer data and management tools that show that relationship and help you take action on it.

James: If I were to summarize your answer, you’d say that the problem with search is digging through the clutter and actually finding where the real value is? And part of how you feel Click Equations is doing that is actually relative to search queries,  trying to find the value and matching up metrics with the queries, and showing you your corresponding keywords that do the matching and costs and conversion values.

Read Part 2 of this Interview with Alex Cohen

or Read Our Review of Click Equations

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 10:15 pm and is filed under interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.