The ActEngine is Clickable’s proprietary recommendation and optimization system for Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  It forms the core of Clickable’s ability to make you better, smarter, and faster at managing your advertising campaigns. The ActEngine was developed by our team of experts who came from companies like Google, Microsoft and Ask.com among others. We’d like to share some of its core attributes so you can use it to drive greater success. Please let us know what you think.

Foremost, the ActEngine is:

• Comprehensive – In contrast to pure bid-management platforms, the ActEngine provides a full suite of qualitative and quantitative recommendations to optimize your account performance.  In addition to bid management recommendations, the ActEngine provides recommendations for campaign structure, keyword selection, quality score management, and other SEM best practices.
• Data-Driven – The best performance management requires the gold standard of performance data, and the gold standard in SEM is conversion data.  With conversion data from our advertisers, the ActEngine identifies profitable areas where spending can be increased, and unprofitable areas where spending should be reduced.
• Goal-Oriented – Clickable recommends that all advertisers define goals for their campaigns; once you define your goals, the ActEngine customizes its recommendations to achieve them.
• Simple and Transparent – People put the most trust in recommendations they can understand and judge for themselves.  For that reason, we aim for complete transparency with all of our actions and alerts. Every recommendation from the ActEngine is presented alongside a series of supporting statistics to help you understand how they will help optimize SEM campaign performance.
• Tested – Millions of dollars of PPC spending is managed by the ActEngine every month, spread over 1000 accounts with millions of keywords.

The ActEngine breaks down SEM management into three core areas: basic account structure, best practices, and quantitative analysis.

Phase 1: Basic Account Structure
When you first begin using Clickable, recommendations focus on fundamentals of account structure, such as configuring conversion tracking, collecting keywords into appropriate ad groups, and setting up high-level targeting appropriately. At this phase, the goal is not to optimize for immediate profitability, but to build a robust foundation of campaigns and ad groups. It’s critical to avoid mistakes that can hobble an account from the start. You may be asked to restructure your account, augment your keyword list, or reconsider your daily budget. If you are creating new campaigns directly within Clickable, you’ll receive simple instructions for starting on the right path. The time you invest in this phase will significantly lower day-to-day maintenance moving forward.

Phase 2: Best Practices
After properly setting up your account, the ActEngine focuses on best practices, such as landing page analysis, keyword targeting, and Quality Score. You’ll receive the bulk of these recommendations as you get started, but you’ll also receive them as you add new landing pages, ad copy and other entities to your account. Every type of advertiser can benefit from applying these best practices—from those trying to drive traffic to a particular page to those trying to drive sales on a comprehensive e-commerce site.

Phase 3: Quantitative Analysis
With our bid and budget recommendations, the ActEngine complements our generic best practices recommendations with recommendations directly related to your specific business goals. (To read more about or Goal Values Wizard, click here.) These recommendations are based on a large set of performance metrics.  For example, we examine each keyword’s position, Click-Through Rate (CTR), Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). As your goals change and the dynamic competitive bidding landscape shifts, our recommendations will adapt accordingly. Seasoned search marketers know that SEM success is never permanent—you have to run to stand still, and Clickable’s ActEngine reflects that reality.

Your customized recommendations aren’t the only things Clickable adapts to. Importantly, we’re constantly working to improve existing recommendations and expand the ActEngine’s reach. While our in-house experts have tremendous insight, customer collaboration is critical. We’re always listening and integrating your feedback. 

Keep checking back! There will always be new ways to succeed and improve.