• ClickEquations, Tuesday, August 5, 2008 1:30 PM

Craig Danuloff argues that despite the wealth of analytics tools out there, paid search practitioners are still at a disadvantage when it comes to obtaining real insights on campaign performance. For example, much of the emphasis stems from analyzing clicks--but how much info does your PPC management software, or even the engines themselves provide about the clicks you didn't get?

There are two kinds of missed clicks, Danuloff says: clicks you didn't get because your ad didn't run (i.e. missed impressions) and those you didn't get when your ad ran (users just didn't click).

While Google provides insight into missed impressions with various reports, Danuloff says that there are no hard metrics supplied for non-clicks when an ad actually runs. So while search marketers can do things like test copy, shift around ad groups and examine landing pages, Danuloff argues that the engines should provide more qualitative info for why users didn't click.

Some of the questions that such reports should answer are as follows: How much better could our CTR have been, how many clicks were missed because we under-performed our position, and was there a specific competitor who took more share from us than another, over time?

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