Search advertisers are becoming increasingly hungry for competitive intelligence. As paid search takes its place alongside more traditional marketing media, players feel the need for a comparative tool such as radio’s Arbitron or TV’s Nielsen ratings: something to indicate how well, or how poorly, your campaigns are being viewed—and how that performance stacks up to your rivals’ efforts.

One service company has come up with what it considers a unique way to survey the competitive search landscape. Chicago-based AdGooRoo says it can map out keywords for any campaign and show a paid search marketer, or an SEM agency working, how often those words are appearing and how much traffic they’re producing.

“What we can measure is an advertising concept called ‘share of voice’,” says AdGooRoo president Richard Stokes, a veteran of advertising agencies. “If you have 100 people at a flea market, all screaming ‘Buy my digital camera!’, you want to know which of those guys have bullhorns.”

In terms of search marketing, share of voice comes from tracking two crucial measurements for each keyword: coverage, or how many times an ad appears in search results on the keyword in question, and relative ranking, or how many ads appear ahead of it.

AdGooRoo gets these measures by using agents in scattered cities around the U.S. to track results for each managed keyword every half hour. The results compiled by these separate agents are then consolidated and put into a one-page Web dashboard. For a monthly fee, subscribers to the AdGooRoo service can log in and get the metrics on how high, and how often, their keywords are appearing in Google searches. They can get both a decimal rating for the overall performance of a portfolio of keywords and a chart that plots that performance against the results of their key competitors. Campaigns that score high on both ranking and coverage will cluster in the upper right quadrant; underperformers will languish in the lower left.

The end product, says Stokes, is a unique topographic map of all the relevant daily activity in a subscriber’s prime search space. “They’ll be able to see who their current top competitors are,” he explains. “They’ll see which of their keywords are being exposed to the maximum degree and, more importantly, which are being underexposed, so they can take corrective action. They can see overall campaign statistics on themselves, and they can also drill straight from that front page and get an x-ray view of what the competition is doing.”

He points out that AdGooRoo is doing more than simply dressing up metrics from the search engines in shiny new clothes. “We can tell you things about your keywords that the engines can’t,” he says.

Take the coverage measure, for example. A year ago, a marketer could spend $1 for a Google search ad and be 100% certain that my ad would show up 100% of the time against that keyword. Today, the same marketer might spend $8 for the same ad against the same keyword and still have no clear idea of how frequently his ad was showing up.

Stokes cites a search agency that managed keywords for a client who wanted to appear at the top of the page every time, no matter what the bids cost. AdGooRoo’s system showed that the client’s ad was in fact appearing only 5% of the time, despite those stratospheric bids. “The agency guy immediately ran to a computer, Googled that search term, and sure enough, he had to do it five or ten times before the ad appeared once,” Stokes says. “He couldn’t believe it.”

Theoretically, AdGooRoo can track as many keywords as a company wants to manage. But Stokes doubts that it’s cost-effective to keep tabs on more than the top tier. AdGooRoo itself targets 2500 to 3000 keywords, but Stokes only tracks 250 in the AdGooRoo system, the ones producing the most traffic and the highest conversion rates. “The most able competitors I’m facing are targeting those same keywords,” he says. “So those are the guys I have to keep an eye on.”

Stokes was formerly a senior technologist with Leo Burnett’s Publicis group, where he spearheaded an effort to put 50 years’ worth of advertising online. An admitted serial entrepreneur, he has also started a number of Internet companies. One of these, an online technology review site called GooRoo, actually gave birth to the platform that AdGooRoo now employs. The software was originally developed to make GooRoo itself more competitive.

“I first realized that it could be commercialized when an ad copywriter friend began trying to get more freelance business through Google,” he says. “I said he should try out this platform we had. He used it and within 48 hours stopped advertising; he had more work than he could handle.”

Since the platform is still relatively new, Stokes and company are still wringing it every which way to discover new ways it might help advertisers. One feature that will prove useful to growing numbers of search marketers is the ability to oversee search engine results for trademark infringement, either in keywords or in the titles of ads. Using AdGooRoo’s service, marketers can be alerted when their trademark appears; they can then take a snapshot of the occurrence, revealing what keywords it’s happening on, the text of the ad, the destination URL and in some cases even the contact information for the Web malefactor. “If you then send all that information to Google, that ad will be down in 20 minutes,” Stokes says.

One other use is still in the experimental stage but may wind up as part of the AdGooRoo feature set. Stokes has been working on taking a batch of keywords and dividing them up into three buckets based on the part they play in the sales-conversion cycle. The first bucket, called “browse” would contain terms that draw viewers who aren’t necessarily looking for anything more than information: short phrases such as “digital camera”, for example. The second bucket, called “shop”, would hold longer, more sophisticated phrases that pull consumers who are ready to spend: “Buy digital cameras” or “compare digital cameras.” The last group, in the “purchase” bucket, would appeal to consumers near the end of the buying decision and would consist of very specific keyword phrases like “Panasonic XE 370 digital camera.”

“We’re looking at the usefulness of tracking competitors in those three buckets to see if there’s some kind of efficiency we can offer marketers using that technique,” Stokes says. “There are some interesting results coming out of this test, and we’re starting to talk about it with some of our biggest subscribers. The ones who are most serious about search engine advertising, with the biggest search budgets and the most search expertise: This is something that should interest them.”

Search advertisers are becoming increasingly hungry for competitive intelligence. As paid search takes its place alongside more traditional marketing media, players feel the need for a comparative tool such as radio’s Arbitron or TV’s Nielsen ratings: something to indicate how well, or how poorly, your campaigns are being viewed—and how that performance stacks up to your rivals’ efforts.

One service company has come up with what it considers a unique way to survey the competitive search landscape. Chicago-based AdGooRoo says it can map out keywords for any campaign and show a paid search marketer, or an SEM agency working, how often those words are appearing and how much traffic they’re producing.

“What we can measure is an advertising concept called ‘share of voice’,” says AdGooRoo president Richard Stokes, a veteran of advertising agencies. “If you have 100 people at a flea market, all screaming ‘Buy my digital camera!’, you want to know which of those guys have bullhorns.”

In terms of search marketing, share of voice comes from tracking two crucial measurements for each keyword: coverage, or how many times an ad appears in search results on the keyword in question, and relative ranking, or how many ads appear ahead of it.

AdGooRoo gets these measures by using agents in scattered cities around the U.S. to track results for each managed keyword every half hour. At press time, AdGooRoo is only able to track keyword performance in Google’s AdWords program: but Stokes says the service is talking with Overture to measure performance in Yahoo searches as well, and he anticipates hooking into their system as early as Q2 2005.

The results compiled by these separate agents are then consolidated and put into a one-page Web dashboard. For a monthly fee, subscribers to the AdGooRoo service can log in and get the metrics on how high, and how often, their keywords are appearing in Google searches. They can get both a decimal rating for the overall performance of a portfolio of keywords and a chart that plots that performance against the results of their key competitors. Campaigns that score high on both ranking and coverage will cluster in the upper right quadrant; underperformers will languish in the lower left.

The end product, says Stokes, is a unique topographic map of all the relevant daily activity in a subscriber’s prime search space. “They’ll be able to see who their current top competitors are,” he explains. “They’ll see which of their keywords are being exposed to the maximum degree and, more importantly, which are being underexposed, so they can take corrective action. They can see overall campaign statistics on themselves, and they can also drill straight from that front page and get an x-ray view of what the competition is doing.”

He points out that AdGooRoo is doing more than simply dressing up metrics from the search engines in shiny new clothes. “We can tell you things about your keywords that the engines can’t,” he says.

Take the coverage measure, for example. A year ago, a marketer could spend $1 for a Google search ad and be 100% certain that my ad would show up 100% of the time against that keyword. Today, the same marketer might spend $8 for the same ad against the same keyword and still have no clear idea of how frequently his ad was showing up.

Stokes cites a search agency that managed keywords for a client who wanted to appear at the top of the page every time, no matter what the bids cost. AdGooRoo’s system showed that the client’s ad was in fact appearing only 5% of the time, despite those stratospheric bids. “The agency guy immediately ran to a computer, Googled that search term, and sure enough, he had to do it five or ten times before the ad appeared once,” Stokes says. “He couldn’t believe it.”

Theoretically, AdGooRoo can track as many keywords as a company wants to manage. But Stokes doubts that it’s cost-effective to keep tabs on more than the top tier. AdGooRoo itself targets 2500 to 3000 keywords, but Stokes only tracks 250 in the AdGooRoo system, the ones producing the most traffic and the highest conversion rates. “The most able competitors I’m facing are targeting those same keywords,” he says. “So those are the guys I have to keep an eye on.”

Stokes was formerly a senior technologist with Leo Burnett’s Publicis group, where he spearheaded an effort to put 50 years’ worth of advertising online. An admitted serial entrepreneur, he has also started a number of Internet companies. One of these, an online technology review site called GooRoo, actually gave birth to the platform that AdGooRoo now employs. The software was originally developed to make GooRoo itself more competitive.

“I first realized that it could be commercialized when an ad copywriter friend began trying to get more freelance business through Google,” he says. “I said he should try out this platform we had. He used it and within 48 hours stopped advertising; he had more work than he could handle.”

Since the platform is still relatively new, Stokes and company are still wringing it every which way to discover new ways it might help advertisers. One feature that will prove useful to growing numbers of search marketers is the ability to oversee search engine results for trademark infringement, either in keywords or in the titles of ads. Using AdGooRoo’s service, marketers can be alerted when their trademark appears; they can then take a snapshot of the occurrence, revealing what keywords it’s happening on, the text of the ad, the destination URL and in some cases even the contact information for the Web malefactor. “If you then send all that information to Google, that ad will be down in 20 minutes,” Stokes says.

One other use is still in the experimental stage but may wind up as part of the AdGooRoo feature set. Stokes has been working on taking a batch of keywords and dividing them up into three buckets based on the part they play in the sales-conversion cycle. The first bucket, called “browse” would contain terms that draw viewers who aren’t necessarily looking for anything more than information: short phrases such as “digital camera”, for example. The second bucket, called “shop”, would hold longer, more sophisticated phrases that pull consumers who are ready to spend: “Buy digital cameras” or “compare digital cameras.” The last group, in the “purchase” bucket, would appeal to consumers near the end of the buying decision and would consist of very specific keyword phrases like “Panasonic XE 370 digital camera.”

“We’re looking at the usefulness of tracking competitors in those three buckets to see if there’s some kind of efficiency we can offer marketers using that technique,” Stokes says. “There are some interesting results coming out of this test, and we’re starting to talk about it with some of our biggest subscribers. The ones who are most serious about search engine advertising, with the biggest search budgets and the most search expertise: This is something that should interest them.”