Paid search expert Andrew Goodman kick-starts a long-overdue discussion of the downside of automated paid search bid management. This is a must-read for anyone who manages large and complex paid search campaigns.
2 Comments
2 Comments
Comments
Great post, Andrew. Once again, you are the provacateur on a topic that has been shy on openness. What PPC agency would ever want to admit to clients that they don’t automate their processes with great technology and bid systems? Manage using only people’s brains - Horrors! But in reality, only the largest of clients will really ever be able to take advantage of most bid automation systems on the market today. Time saving and money saving tools are always needed, bu the dynamic complexity and interactions witihin PPC campaigns, the markets and the search engine ad serving platforms make almost all systems worthless to all but a few very large advertisers.On its face, each subsystem in PPC campaigns involves relatively simple math. Calculate ROI on a keyword. No problem. Choose the better performing landing page. Easy. A/B test ads. No Brainer. Make it easier to manage cross-platform campaigns. Piece of cake. But when you add in all the interactions between all the internal moving parts of campaigns layer on top of that a diverse marketplace with hundreds of advertisers with hundreds of targeting tactics, and then layer on top of that the ever-changing and proprietary operation of search engine ad serving platforms, and you have a nearly impossible automation problem.While it seems like computers and progams are up to the challenge, that’s a trap - at least for the forseeable future. I’d liken it to the challenge of solving for infinity: See: "Utilizing Infinite Loops to Compute an Approximate Value of Infinity" http://www-user.slac.stanford.edu/jimstan/Infinity.htm Jim Stanfield, co-founder, The Institute for Further Research.With all the dynamics, and interactions of unknown and unknowable variables, it is going to be tough sledding for companies to develop and support systems in the general marketplace. There is plenty of room for single-purpose automation tools, but there will be a lot of fallout in the automation tools market in the coming years. This topic will be a rich one for discussion by all the stakeholders: tools vendors, campaign managers and search engines. There is plenty of room for machine-assisted campaign management, but not yet for machine control.Thank you for opening up this topic, Andrew. Looking forward to your upcoming insights into current state of the art in the automation space. Matt Van Wagner
I always felt a little outmoded using Adwords Editor and excel sheets to update bids -even though it’s been phenomenally effective. I believe there is opportunity for automated bid systems to fish out opportunities, and creating rules that are customized to your’ needs can potentially go a ways towards to cranking out a couple more sales for your’ marketing dollar.The concern you address as far as what the goal of the campaign is, I think would be better addressed if you break down the ads into campaign buckets by goal, and then used rule based bidding to manage that.Rules based bid solutions aren’t that expensive, and I’ve always found that the more complex a solution is, the less useful it is in the real world. I recently demo’ed a service, and I found I was doing a much better job in parts of it just with handy excel sheet.