The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Earlier this month, I took some time to drop by SMX East, Danny Sullivan’s conference for Search Engine Marketers.  There, like everywhere I go these days, people were talking about the economy.  More specifically, people were talking about how the economy will impact search marketing.

In one of the panels, Nick Fox, Product Management Director for Ads Quality at Google, made a point that really resonated for me: when consumer spending drops, the best marketers won’t drop their SEM budgets, but will, instead, focus more tightly on managing their bids and targeting to drive maximum returns.

This approach makes a lot of sense.  If you were to simply cut your budget, you’d be cutting spending on your best and worst performing keywords at the same time.  I examine dozens of SEM campaigns every day, and each one has some keywords that are driving highly profitable traffic, along with some keywords that are providing little or no return. Identifying and addressing those inefficiencies is the best way to drive higher returns from your SEM budget.

All of this makes our latest update to the Clickable ActEngine all the more timely. Through a number of small updates this month, we’ve increased our rate of keyword bid recommendations drastically.  If you’re already using Clickable, you’ve probably noticed a substantial increase in the number of bid recommendations based on the historical performance of each keyword.

In addition, you’re also now receiving bid recommendations to help ensure that your bids bring traffic to each of your keywords, and that your bids don’t expose you to a risk of large fluctuations in cost. These recommendations are meant to improve both the rate of traffic from your campaigns and the predictability of your spending.

As with all of our recommendations, these new ones build on our commitment to transparency.  With each bid recommendation, we give you a short description of the analysis behind it. Each bid recommendation provides a set of metrics to demonstrate how we reached our conclusion, and an estimate for the anticipated impact of the recommendation. It’s all about bringing you greater profit, performance and visibility – and in less time.

I hope you’re already benefiting from these new recommendations. In the meantime, we’re all hard at work on the next set of recommendations.  As always, we want to hear your feedback on the recommendations you’re seeing from the Clickable ActEngine. Please feel free to share any comments with us here on the blog, or directly with our entire support team.