KeywordMax More Information Overall Rating: Not Rated Pay Per Click Universe Recommends: AdWatcher - 100% Click Fraud Protection. Concerned about click fraud? Protect your online advertising dollars with the world's most trusted & accurate click fraud solution on the market today. AdWatcher will put a stop to competitors and fraudsters who are looking to drain your hard earned advertising budget. Test-Drive AdWatcher For FREE For 30 Days! KeywordMax™ is a division of Direct Response Technologies, Inc., a Philadelphia-based company founded in 1994 by one individual with $100 (although until September of 2002 its name was Advertising Concepts, Inc. It is now a corporation operating in many different countries, with a service center in North Dakota, and partly owned by Jupiter Media. The company’s basic focus is the direct marketing industry, offering services such as online gift certificates, online coupons, affiliate tracking software, etc. In 2003, they introduced KeywordMax™, a keyword, click tracking and bid management tool centered on the bottom line (ROI). KeywordMax™ is available only in packages of bundled products. The most basic, Merchant Standard, includes products called ROI Tracker, Click Auditor and Keyword Builder at $99/month, which covers one domain name and apparently unlimited keywords (although KeywordMax™’s parent site does not show an “unlimited keywords” sticker on this product in its presentation). Merchant Standard allows a maximum of 75,000 clicks tracked per month (although you can choose to be billed $.02 cents more per click over that amount). It also will estimate your clicks per month based on your keywords, using data from Google, Overture, and a number of other unspecified search engines. The ROI Tracker product tracks all forms of online and offline ad campaigns, with details on the source of the purchase, number of clicks, total spend, cost per click, type of action, sales, conversion percentage and ROI, and also follows repeat purchasers. Reports are available for all types of ads and all the expected search engines are included. For pay-per-click in particular, the reports list each search engine your paid ad is on and the details of the performance of your keywords with not quite as much detail as other PPC tracking tool reports. The pay per click report is not as fully detailed as other keyword tracking tools, but the basics are covered. What makes ROI Tracker appeal to the user is the company’s overall affiliation with Yahoo! as a Preferred Partner and the ease with which one can set up an account and receive clear and easy-to-understand reports. Click Auditor is the click fraud component of the package and is directed solely at pay-per-click ad campaigns. This service emails you reports called “Suspicious IP’s” [sic], “Geographic Activity”, “Click Spikes” (which not only track strange click patterns but also conversion rates that are rapidly declining), and “Competitor Tracking” (where they track how often your competitors click on your ad by IP address. Of all these options, geographic tracking and click spiking may be most useful, as IP tracking is still problematic for all those trying to prevent click fraud due to defrauders continually finding ways to block their IP addresses. One nice aspect of this package is the ability to download logs to the PPC search engines you use, which detail suspected fraud activity. The final basic component is Keyword Builder. This tool uses data from Overture, Google, and other unspecified search engines to analyze your keyword list (provided either via a KeywordMax™ tool or an Excel spreadsheet) and provides you with a list of synonyms, common misspellings, related terms, and an estimate of traffic using real search data. The sample report shown on the website, however, appears to show only the number of such events, not the actual misspellings, etc. From this basic package, you can choose higher-priced packages with additional options, all the way up to their Agency Premium package at $999 per month whose major advantage is branding tracking. However, for pay-per-click customers, the second of the four available packages may be of most interest, since it adds a product called Bid Director, albeit at a monthly rate of $199, a full $100 per month more than the basic package. This second package, called Merchant Pro, doubles the amount of clicks/actions allowed, although Bid Director’s “actions” are bid checking as well as bid changing. Another product aimed only at the PPC market, Bid Director allows up to 24 automatic updates per day per keyword based on activity of others bidding on the same keywords. It is currently offered only for Overture, Google AdWords, FindWhat, Espotting, and Kanoodle, with Enhance listed as upcoming. In addition to the usual auto bidding tools, KeywordMax™ is up front about Bid Director containing a couple of aspects that are quite aggressive. One called Competitive Bid (available only on Overture) involves “jamming” which KeywordMax™ states “…lets you force anyone bidding one position above you to pay their maximum bid”; the second, called Friendly URL, allows you to identify URLs you wish to bid below or above. You can request demos of each of the products via an email request, which requires you to provide a fair amount of information in order to be “approved” for a demo. Demos will not be approved if you have a free email account, and the form you need to fill out to request a demo is clearly interested in sending you affiliate information. The website itself is very attractive – clear, clean, lots of white space, and very well organized. Navigation is easy and details are clearly laid out in a summary page of all services offered. They also have a handy resources page providing not only links, but also articles on various topics, some interesting optimization tools, and offers weekly tutorials for clients. A page that compares KeywordMax™’s features is useful, but needs an update, as its comparisons include only Overture and GoToast. GoToast was renamed on May 24, 2004 to Atlas OnePoint (about 5 months ago). Overall, the website, although attractive, has numerous typographical errors, incomplete and nonsense sentences. A general updating of content is definitely needed to maintain the professional impression the graphic look gives this product and the general indications of user satisfaction with the performance of this tool, especially as a double-check against web analytics that may be included in your PPC search engine package. |
