The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Hello everyone, I am Jonathan Betz, an Engineering Director here at Clickable.  Max asked me to take a moment to introduce myself and tell you a little bit about where we’re going with Clickable’s recommendation system, the ActEngine.
 
Let me share a little of my background.  I joined Clickable about five months ago.  Prior to Clickable, I spent five years at Google, where I worked on a wide variety of projects.  In my first few years, I focused on information extraction and machine learning applications for improving Search Quality; those efforts led to over 18 patents filed by Google, and the launch of the “Google Q&A” feature.  In my last two years at Google, I moved to the Ads side of the house, working on projects like AdWords Report Center, AdWords Change History, and, most recently, Google Ad Manager.
 
In my experience working on AdWords, I saw firsthand that although AdWords can be a powerful solution, many advertisers never make it past the steep learning curve.  Even worse, advertisers who get over the initial learning curve might still spend their advertising dollars unprofitably. The ever-changing competitive landscape of search keyword auctions means that every account needs constant monitoring.  The small businessperson who doesn’t have the time to become an SEM expert can never fully maximize results in AdWords.
 
When I decided to leave Google, I was looking for a startup taking on big challenges.  I talked with a lot of companies that are tackling interesting problems, but very few of them were tackling problems that I saw as very important.  That’s where Clickable stood out from the rest – bringing the power of effective and profitable search advertising to the small and medium business is a great challenge for the next several years.
 
When I joined the Clickable Team, our founders asked me to take the lead on the ActEngine, the optimization tool that helps advertisers spot every opportunity for advertising more effectively. If you’re already using Clickable, you know the ActEngine provides recommendations on keyword bids, campaign budgets, account structure, keyword selection, and many other aspects of your pay-per-click advertising.  We’re already providing thousands of recommendations every day, but this is just the beginning.
 
In the long term, the ActEngine will contain an even wider variety of techniques drawn from statistics, economics, machine learning, and natural language processing to help advertisers organize and optimize their campaigns.  The ultimate ActEngine will be a trusted advisor, an SEM consultant on call 24 hours a day, always up to speed on the latest quantitative and qualitative best practices, and always on the lookout for ways to help advertisers improve.
 
Our latest product release, launched last week, includes new recommendations that will help advertisers optimize their Quality Score – the often enigmatic value that, when combined with bid amount, determines an ad’s position in sponsored results, and the amount an advertiser pays for each click.  With these new recommendations, advertisers will be able to reduce costs while improving placement, consequently driving up clickthrough rates, and, ultimately, profitability.
 
Over the next few months, we’ll be focusing on a few areas, including more advanced bid recommendations, better management of content network campaigns, structural design of campaigns and ad groups, and landing page quality.  The entire team is busy hacking away at all of these problems right now. As new releases come out, I’ll be posting here to share the details of our new recommendations.

Stay tuned – there is a lot of exciting stuff to come.

I've always enjoyed being a problem solver. In the early years of my career, that pushed me to climb

Clickable's team includes search marketing experts with a wide range of expertise, and we've