One of the key advantages of SEM is that data can be measured at several points in the sales funnel. For example: Impressions measure the degree of user intent, Click Through Rates (CTR) measure the effectiveness of your ads in capturing that intent, Cost Per Click (CPC) measures the price you are paying to capture intent and finally the ROI measures the rate of return on investment in this marketplace. While this multi-dimensional measurability of data is a key asset to the search advertiser, the complex interactions of the metrics can be daunting to analyze without the right mathematical and analytical tools. Visualization techniques such as treemaps, which was discussed in a recent post, can help capture several dimensions of data successfully and make the data meaningful. In this post, we present another very powerful tool called Motion Charts that can capture 5 dimensions of data in an extremely effective manner. Whats more these charts are fun ! Before, delving into these charts, a bit of history. Motion Charts were first presented to a large audience by Dr Hans Rosling in a famous TED talk where he discussed global health in an extremely engaging manner. The tool he used was called the Trendalyzer developed by a non-profit Gapminder.org . Google later acquired the Trendalyzer and developed this technology into the Motion Charts. It is now part of the Google Docs suite of visualization tools . As an example, we will analyze the performance of a hypothetical SEM campaign with this chart.
The two bubbles represent 2 portfolios of campaigns managed by Efficient Frontier. One bubble represents Google campaign and other represents the Yahoo campaign. If one moves her mouse over the right most bubble, 4 dimensions readily become apparent. The horizontal axis captures weekly spend, the vertical axis captures weekly account signups, the size of the bubble is proportional to average conversion rate (free registration to paid subscription rate) for the Google portfolio and the color of the bubble is proportional to the CPA of this portfolio (note the color specturm on the right side of the chart). The paramters to be tracked can be interactively changed by selecting the drop downs on the axes and on the right side of the chart. Finally, note the date on the right side of the chart. This is the fifth dimension. So, to interpret: on Week starting May 1 the Google portfolio generated 800 registrations at $1000 spend with a conversion rate of 9.4% at a Cost Per Registration (CPR) of $1.25. Moving the slider, will change the time and will display the locations of the 3 portfolios on that week. Hitting the play button will play the "movie" of your quarterly performance. Trails are a very powerful feature in the motion chart. To enable trails, check the trails box on the screen (it defaults as already checked), change the size parameter of the bubbles (in the drop down) to "same size", and click on the Google portfolio bubble again. You would now see a name tag pop up next to it. On pressing play again, the Google portfolio is "tracked" over the quarter and one can clearly see the change in performance over time. In this example, the Google portfolio is seen to be 25% more efficient from week 2 i.e. the weekly account signups have increased by about 25% at close to the spend on week 1. Also note that since week 2, the portfolio has clustered at its "sweet spot" i.e. while there are week to week fluctations in performance, i is always better than the performance on week 1. An analysis of several accounts managed by EF reveals a similar pattern i.e. while performance fluctuates on a weekly basis, the portfolios cluster around a region of higher efficiency due to optimization.
