When Alex Cohen (@digitalalex) reached out to me to do a review of ClickEquations I was a little unsure as to whether it would be a worthwhile use of time. After all I’ve probably looked at 10 different search marketing tools that think they are doing something special but very few are really doing anything unique. I do have to say that ClickEquations is doing some cool things.

Generally when reviewing a paid search tool I look for the core elements that all search tools should have (bid management, reporting, tracking, pricing, and analysis) and try to understand what they offer that differentiates them from others. The more I think through what ClickEquations has to offer I am more and more impressed with their offering. Here is a breakdown of some of the strengths and weaknesses of ClickEquations.

Bid Management

I think Alex and I philosophically disagreed about the overall importance of the bid management piece of a paid search tool and this is probably one of the weaker pieces of the overall ClickEquations system but still beats out most of their competitors.

They use a algorithmic based bid management system that allows for automatic bid changes or queue recommended changes for approval. This is pretty standard but they did offer some interesting settings to control the scope of changes. These core settings were:

• + Cost-per-Acqusition (CPA) targeting
• + Support for multiple conversion events – You can select specific conversion target for different bid rules, which can be applied at the keyword or ad group level (this is interesting)
• + Chose between first click attribution, last click attribution, linear attribution, or weighted, which gives weighted conversion and revenue credit to some or all of the keywords that lead to conversion (this is cutting edge type stuff and an area that ClickEquations excels in)
• + Intensity of changes. This is essentially a risk tolerance throttle with the ability to determine whether changes should be more conservative or aggressive (not cutting edge but few others are offering this level of  control to users)
• + Scope of changes. How far back should the data go to make decisions and if enough data is unavailable would you like ClickEquations to look at ad group level data? This ensures that bid changes are made with the right amount of data.

Reporting

ClickEquations had a separate Excel plug-in, which is included in the cost, called ClickEquations Analyst that is used for reporting. All I can say about this is – “Holy Crap”. I’m not much for urban slang but this piece was off the hook. Essentially what they do is have a set of canned reports (they’ll create custom reports to your business upon request) with some customization which is pretty cool but where this excels (pun intended) is in their integration with Excel. Once you have an Excel report created you can easily click a few buttons and instantly update the report for any date range you want. The amount of time this would save a client or an agency is incomparable. The only worry I have here is that it doesn’t seem to be a very secure way to pass data and one that from my limited understanding makes that client data susceptible to packet sniffers. ClickEquations does maintain, however, that they haven’t had any issues with the security of their client data with such reports. Just be cautious here.

This is Pretty Fantastic!!!

Tracking

ClickEquations uses a fairly standard script based tracking system but use it on a non-standard way. If there were one thing ClickEquations is doing now that will keep them at the top of the conversation when talking about the best search tools is their choice to focus on multi point attribution. To explain in case this is a new concept to any of you, it is widely accepted that many visitors to a site are likely to visit more than once in the course of making a purchase. Often times these visitors will come from multiple referring sources (e.g. banners, paid Google search, email marketing campaign, etc…) but currently most systems will only credit the last referrer prior to a transaction. ClickEquations allows clients to optimize by attributing conversions to the original click, the last click, equal credit to all clicks or some weighting all of the clicks. What’s more even if you choose to optimize using one type of attribution you can still see reporting that allows you to understand how you might view your data differently were you to change attribution models.

Analysis

I’m not sure if I’ve seen any tool other than Acquisio do anything really interesting on this front but in the words of American Idol’s Randy Jackson, it was just aight (I won’t say it was pitchy). ClickEquations has an alerts process called ClickEquations Adviser. Aside from my own weirdness around the concept of “Best Practices” or what I call “Things Someone Else Did Well Yesterday” the suggestions were really just alerts that would help you to keep an eye on potential problem areas. I shouldn’t be too hard on them though because this is definitely a technology challenge to make these recommendations/alerts more helpful.

Pricing

While not a fan of the flat fee plus percent of spend model these prices are phenomenal and especially given the value offered to clients. Again, having spoken to several other agencies and search tools I’ve seen absurd pricing and this is not one of them. These prices are in the most competitive group you’ll find and the accompanying tools are phenomenal.

I’d recommend ClickEquations to anyone serious about search marketing and would be shocked if they didn’t see meaningful improvements to the performance of their search campaigns.

About ClickEquations

ClickEquations is the first intelligent paid search platform for large advertisers and agencies. ClickEquations offers complete 3-engine management, bidding, and reporting plus intelligent extras that make life easier. ClickEquations Segments help you focus with 1-click filters show the critical slices of your campaigns. ClickEquations Adviser highlights the most important things to do with a set of best practices algorithms. ClickEquations Manager and Analyst simplify optimization with features including bid automation, bulk editing, and simply powerful analytics. We have no hassle pricing, no setup fee and included support.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 at 11:46 pm and is filed under reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.