Microsoft has recently released a plugin tool for Excel 2007 that might rival all available engine keyword tools. It is called AdIntelligence and it provides a lot of interesting data.

The two features I find the most promising are the monthly traffic tool, which takes keywords you input and returns historical search data from the Microsoft search engine Live.com. The tests I have done show huge variations in month to month traffic, which is very interesting, if the reported numbers are accurate.

Here’s an example of a few car insurance keywords with a year of historic data, as well as 3 months of predicted performance. (Click the image to see the full version.)

This level of transparency and the amount of data provided directly by a search engine blows apps like the old Overture keyword tool out of the water. The spikes in data are curious, though.  Take for example “buy car insurance online” which vaulted from 9,096 queries in May to 105,523 in July. This would not be as suspicious to me if the same fluctuations were seen in other related keywords, but that’s not the case in this instance.  It makes it hard to chalk such a fluctuation up to seasonal performance changes.  Data integrity remains a question. Either way, this feature is very promising (the tool is still in beta) and should help anyone at least get an overall idea of the traffic behind their potential keywords.

The other interesting feature is a monetization breakdown, which takes a list of keywords you provide and returns the impressions, clicks, average position, CTR, and CPC for all advertisers on AdCenter. I was fairly surprised to see so much information freely provided by Microsoft, considering how closely guarded the engines traditionally keep this information.

Here are some of the same car insurance keywords from the last example:

According to this data, there were 971 clicks on the exact keyword “car insurance quotes” in the last month, at an average CPC of $15.00, all the advertisers bidding on this keyword averaged a 3.05% CTR.

Other features of AdIntelligence not covered here are a Demographic and Geographic breakdown of keywords, as well as several keyword research tools, that take either a URL or original keyword and return a list of similar keywords. There is also a tool that will return keywords that advertisers are bidding on related to your original keyword.

AdIntelligence is a plugin for Excel 2007, you can download the beta here. There is also a 60 day demo of Excel 2007 available at the link if you don’t have it. I highly recommend trying out the tool, and I hope Microsoft continues to add new features.

The Yahoo Search Marketing Blog recently published another article on keyword insertion, one of my least favorite PPC strategies.

The reason I am down on keyword insertion is that it is a fundamentally lazy way of improving campaign performance. It was designed so that novice PPC managers could get better clickthrough rates without a lot of effort. The theory being that seeing the keywords emboldened in the ads will attract the attention of the searcher and thereby improve clickthrough rates.

So first, the disclaimer. If you have a campaign with large ad groups full of diverse search terms, it is possible, or even likely, that keyword insertion will improve your conversion rate. However, there is a limit to how much this can help.

The problem with keyword insertion is twofold. First, it can often result in fairly odd ads, for example:

What does this mean? Are they supporting charm sales or bicycle sales? Bicycle charm sales? If so, they don’t seem to be attempting to qualify a target audience and the ad copy doesn’t really work for any of these potential audience segments.

Second, it is tempting to create very large and diverse ad groups or avoid dealing with the issues that these types of ad groups can cause. The problem is that large and diverse ad groups don’t perform as well as small and cohesive ad groups in building quality score and in identifying diverging behavior in audience segments.

To use Yahoo’s example, they suggest combining the keywords “chardonnay” and “wine” to use in the same ad. However, if we create a user profile for these terms where the user attributes are:

“wine” - low wine education, searching for gift, cost-conscious

“chardonnay” - oenophile, searching for self, quality-driven, bulk-buyer

We can easily see that if we limit optimization to what works for both these audience segments, we may easily miss massive opportunity for increased clickthrough and conversion rates.

Keyword insertion can work, particularly where the ad groups are conceptually tight and the resulting ad text isn’t nonsensical, however, we would not consider it a good best practice in most situations.

It has come up a number of times. I’ll be deep in conversation on Pay-Per-Click strategy with one of our clients and they will suddenly say “You know, you should blog this.”

Since our founding in 2003, Working Planet has been a quiet company. We have incredibly loyal clients who have kept us busy with referrals and that has limited our need to talk about ourselves. Since we believe in steady and rational growth, we have not had to hit the trade show circuit or invest in large marketing programs. We stay as busy as we want, putting our clients first, and have roughly doubled in size each year.

However, it does make sense to share some of our thoughts on performance-focused Pay-Per-Click management as we have a great vantage point. The Pay-Per-Click space is maturing, and more companies are realizing that it is all about the numbers. Paid Search continues to be a fast-growing and rapidly evolving space, and one where an unwavering focus on the numbers and the clients’ bottom line results has to drive all aspects of campaign structure and strategy.

We look forward to sharing our thoughts with you. If you have questions about what you read here, let us know. I can always be reached at:

soren @ workingplanet.com

Soren Ryherd
President
Working Planet Marketing Group, Inc.