SEMphonic's president and chief technology officer provides examples of how analytics can bolster the creative process.

It's a truism that Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a direct-response channel. This has some obvious (and well-understood) implications: like tying creative closely to the keywords used by the searcher and making ad copy drive to action. But when you send a letter or a catalog to a prospective buyer you can count on your message getting, for whatever period it captures the customers' notice, undivided attention. In the world of PPC, however, your ad is always stacked up with an array of other ads-- all competing simultaneously.

This means that there is no such thing as good creative in the abstract-- you can't craft a message in isolation. Your creative folks need to understand what other messages their creative will be stacked up against and where in the list a creative will fall. A pitch that might work pretty well in the #1 slot may be too tame for the #6 slot.

Here, for example, is a case where three different companies have chosen to put a price in their ads. Brand being equal, it's a bad idea to be targeting price when you are the most expensive ad listed! Listings that take a totally different tack -- emphasizing reliability, size, quality or service -- are likely to do better.

In this next example, some of the listings are much more responsive to the query (1031 Exchange Properties) than others that simply run the same ad they use for 1031 Exchange. But even among those that are responsive, some are offering hundreds while others are offering thousands of choices. Perhaps "100s" could be re-written as "huge selection."

Giving your creative types a good sense of what ads are running for each group of words is critical if you expect to get good ad copy. Far too often, writers never see most of the ads the competition is running.

Along the same lines, your writers often need to know everything a single competitor is doing.

One last common mistake is to stop tracking creative once you've launched a campaign. Understanding when competitors shift price points or tactics is essential information for your writers.

Creating a feedback loop
If buyers start with a range of creative, they sometimes optimize within the creative units without ever letting the writers know what's working and what isn't. That usually means when the next round of creative takes place, writers make the same mistakes all over again. And as with search terms, you need to evaluate creative by both clickthrough and conversion.

In general, it's a bad idea to think about an ad at the campaign level. Ads need to be tuned to type of search request-- and while some ads run across multiple groups you need to tune at the group or keyword level. An ad may do very well for one set of words but very poorly for another.

Note how different each ad below performs by ad group (ad groups are in columns, creative in the rows).

Clickthrough is, on its face, an incredibly important measure of how well a creative is performing. But both buyers and writers need to be aware that it is only half the story. A very aggressive creative may pull well but attract the wrong kind of audience. We call the quality of clicks generated by an ad its qualification level. Some ads pull lots of eyeballs but don't deliver good prospects.

Analytic thinking
SEM analytics isn't always about crunching big numbers. Competitive landscaping -- making sure your creative types have full access to all the information they need to help them do the best job possible -- is one of the most important ways that analytics and technology can help support, not stifle, the creative process.

You can't expect your writers to do good work in a vacuum. Providing them with all of the information they need to make their job easier, and helping them understand what worked and what didn't, are critical tasks for a measurement team helping to build a better SEM program.