Today I was given a demo of Clickshift.com’s services. They seem to be in startup phase and have a sales force cold-calling around in the industry. I’m not sure how they got my number at the office (they started with the main number, poor sales guys), but eventually were directed to me. Having the entrepreneurial spirit that I do, I’m always willing to check something out that’s new and at the very least proprietary (which they claim their service is) or interesting within the first 20 seconds of the cold call. Having done cold-calling myself for SuperMotors, I know what an up-hill battle it is, so I keep an open ear to anyone that happens to catch me at my desk.

Clickshift.com Model:

The presentation was interesting. I gathered most of what they offered from their site, so the call was a little bit of a regurgitation of what’s on their site, but I did get to see a demo of the software. The software application looks very user friendly (major bonus points for me) and easy to get around. These are two very important things when dealing with reporting on search engine marketing simply due to the sheer volume of data that you will collect with a search engine marketing budget over the course of several months. I manage a few hundred keywords at this time but will plan on expanding on this as we invest more money into SEM. Fortunately, I have a baseline for performance based on what I’ve done so far this year.

UI goes a long ways
While on the “a good UI is good” rant, the simple, straight-forward UI of Clickshift is another reason why it looks interesting. Omniture’s SearchCenter is somehwat of a cumbersome application. Omniture, while it has the bells and whistles a marketer needs, lacks the clarity in an intuitive UI. It’s the reason why I run Google Analytics and Omniture Analytics in tandem. Google just makes it easy to navigate the basics.

However, there is a limit to what Google can do, thus the requirement for Omniture (more sophisticated tracking capability). I really hope Omniture considers a usability study with its “average user.” I’m very technically inclined, but fail to quickly grasp the entire offering of the application due to the many nested layers of navigation, reporting, and custom reporting.

I will admit, they have tutorials availble online and I haven’t spent the time to watch through them all. But then again, I didn’t have to watch videos for Google Analytics to get it to do what I wanted. It (Google Analytics) just made sense.

More than just bid management
What I like about Clickshift is that it takes into considering landing pages, too, and optimizes your campaigns with different landing pages included in the mix. It manages day-parting, geo-targetting, keyword bidding, landing pages, etc. all in a central location. Currently, I use Omniture SearchCenter and am not pleased with their UI (overly complex) and the fact that you have to anticipate what to do with it. Clickshift is more about self-discovery whereas Omniture’s SearchCenter is about maximizing your keywords based on just a single landing page.

I will post more results if I go through with it.