Treemaps: SEM Campaign Visualization Tool

In a presentation at SMX Advanced earlier this month, Sid Shah, PhD, Sr. Business Analyst at Efficient Frontier, introduced two useful tools for visualizing campaign performance. Histograms were shown to be useful for setting performance goals for head keywords versus tail keywords. Treemaps were the second visualization tool Sid presented and will be explained here.

Treemaps were developed in the early 1990's by professor Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland. He sought a way to visualize directory tree structures on his hard drive in order to find large files that could be deleted or identify which users consumed the largest amount of disk space. Eventually treemaps were developed into a usable software product and the version we use at Efficient Frontier is available as an Excel add-in from Microsoft Research.

Good examples of treemaps in action are SmartMoney's Map of the Market and this news map. Looking at the Map of the Market is a quick way to see how certain sectors have performed, and which stocks in those sectors are performing well or poorly. Each rectangle represents a company, and the size of the rectangle represents the company's market cap, while the color shows price performance. Mousing over the rectangles shows the name and data for the individual stocks, and clicking allows you to drill down further on each sector and view sub-sector performance.

Similarly, treemaps can be applied to your search campaign. In the fictitious example used here, the smallest rectangles represent individual keywords, and the size of the rectangles indicates spend. The keywords are grouped by campaign, and finally by search engine. The color indicates ROI, with red representing poor ROI, and purple representing positive ROI. The shade of the color indicates how negative or positive the ROI is, with white representing average ROI. You could also use revenue, CPA, impressions, CTR, CPC, or any other metric to size or color your rectangles.

In the fictitious example above, we can see that Google accounted for about 60% of spend, with the "gift baskets" and "flowers" campaigns about equal in spend. Since this retailer, called Flower Express, does not have a very strong brand, its brand terms account for a small portion of spend. The keywords "flower delivery" and "flower arrangements" are among the best performing on Google, while it appears "florist shop" and "floral shop" performed poorly on both Google and Yahoo. This could indicate that those searchers are seeking local shops rather than an online shop, and investment in those terms should be reduced. Non product specific terms "gifts for men" and gifts for women" did not perform well, and perhaps spend could be shifted to high ROI terms like "plant arrangements." Like SmartMoney's Map of the Market, search engine or campaign rectangles can be clicked on to drill down, which can be helpful when examining data sets larger than the one shown.

For those of you who spend the day poring through spreadsheets containing rows of numbers in an effort to measure and improve campaign performance, treemaps can be a refreshing way to visualize data. They can help you spot opportunities as well as eliminate poor performers. They can also help you determine the level of risk in your campaign by showing just how dominant a head term might be. At Efficient Frontier, treemaps provide our business analysts and account managers insights about our accounts to help grow them for the future, and further improve the high campaign performance provided by our bid management technology.

 

Comments

[Leonardo Naressi]

Great LeeAnn,
With the large amount of data we have to handle for online campaigns, data visualization is a important step for optimization and analysis.
Thanks!
Leo

[Pay Per Click Journal]

What a refreshing new way to distribute data! Definitely bookmarking this article and considering this method for showing our next campaign's results!