@Mary Thanks so much for stopping by to share your thoughts with us. Your contributions to the industry as a whole are amazing! I just submitted my email address to get that report and will read it soon!! It sounds like your findings will fit nicely with what I have planned for next week’s post.

@everyone Sorry I didn’t update this post yesterday with the latest post in the series. Looking forward to your thoughts on what I think is an industry-wide misunderstanding regarding bid automation.

Great article and right on the money. We have found that folks get really confused when selecting a bid management solution and too many end up continuing to bid manually when there is no need for it.

We have just written a very large objective research report on the merits/drawbacks of using a bid management solution. We interviewed a ton of folks (vendors, bid management users, advertisers, agencies etc.) and the conclusions were quite surprising. You can download a free synopsis of our findings here: http://ppcsummit.com/landingpage/lp1.html and if you’d like some insight on the information we learned, feel free to ping me before you write your next article.

In most cases (not all) your time is much more productively spent with keywords, messaging and landing page optimization, than in poring over your bids all day.

That said, a human still has to be involved in the bid management process, and be an informed user. These tools are only as good as the information you put into them, and many users don’t set up their goals or bids correctly and then wonder why the tool doesn’t give them the returns they expected.

A tool is a tool, not an alternative to human intervention and analysis but many marketers have a set it and forget it mentality and that’s what gets them into trouble. You can’t manage a pay per click campaign like you would a standard media buy, although many agencies would like to think you can.

To @Dan Perach’s point, we found there are a couple of tools that are now cost effective for managing small business accounts, so he might want to check them out again.

Cheers, Mary

Automation, additionally, does not allow less efficient but high converting terms, to maintain their higher position when setting KPIs in the tool. It would see these terms as “underperforming” and bid them down when in reality, you may want to capture those conversions and use the efficiency of the rest of your portfolio to allow for that higher positioning.

It may just be my experience but any automated tool we have used has resulted in higher costs and lower efficiency. At a new position I was in, my company was using automated tools through a well known search agency. While we were meeting the goals we asked our agency to set, there was thousands of dollars being lost in getaway bidding, self competition (a whole new discussion!), match types and overall being careless when relying on tools.

We’ve performed many tests with “human vs. computer” and human has almost always won.

@Andrew Nattan Haha! Very well said – I couldn’t agree more!

As most… ALL of my accounts are “small”… I’m stuck with manual bid optimization, although using Editor… its not such a big deal, if you know what your doing… http://blog.ppcproz.com/2009/11/keyword-bid-management-method.html

That being said, I really savor the day when my small accounts can “graduate” to Google Conversion Optimizer bidding.

Instead of needing to adjust bids religiously, at least 2x/week, with CO you can adjust adgroup CPA bids, and/or adjust campaign budgets… as well as pause underperforming kws (but not before finding new kws from the sqr)… CPA bidding allows the best of all worlds for small/medium accounts… keeping an eye on the ball, and performing.

I’ll post to my Blog the workflow I use for CPA bidding; that’s not a promise though

@SEM Dude Hmm…I think the end of my thoughts to @Jason are worth repeating here. I believe statisticians and real automated bid management solutions DO take into account seasonality and they are quite amazing with their ability to adapt to sales, seasons, etc. There appears to be a lot of confusion between what I consider ‘true’ or ‘real’ automation and what is marketed in the marketplace as ‘automated’…I hope you, SEM Dude (aka Anonymous?) care to come back and comment on my next post. I also wish you would own your comments. Why hide from your opinion? Everybody is entitled to their own opinion – own it.

@billy Haha! I thought it sounded a little salesy too while editing the post…but I can assure you, I have nothing to sell except for the concept that manual ppc bid management is dead.