We have been using our proprietary automated bid management software for over a year now and we’ve seen a vast improvement in productivity metrics and campaign results. Earlier most of the time we spent on an account used to be on bid management and reporting. Now that time has been reduced by over 30%! And we’ve been able to squeeze out more value from accounts that had hit a plateau.

Although the overall interest in bid management software seems to have waned over the last few years, there still seems to be a lot of debate online about the need for automated bid management.

Interest Over Time for ‘bid management software’ | 2004 – present

There are those who say that an in-house team doing manual bid management is better than buying a costly tool. They’re right in a way. We all know that PPC campaign optimization is more than just bid management. You need to monitor ad and LP performance while battling aggressive competitors and adjusting for seasonality, all the while keeping an eye on your profit margins. But they’re talking about small budget, minimal complexity campaigns. So it’s true that spreadsheet-rule-based bid management is enough.

As Ron Jones says, “If you’re spending less than $5,000 per month, then using the search engines’ bid management system may be all you need… you probably don’t have enough data for an automated system to make a significant difference. Automated tools do better when there’s a larger dataset to work with.”

We’ve seen that when working with our tool. We have taken on clients who spend very less, have few keywords or have keywords that don’t have much competition, most of which are ‘brand’ keywords, and we’ve struggled to get the account to scale up, or even provide enough value to justify the cost of the tool. On the flip side, we have seen that improving Quality Score goes a long way in getting more out of these less complex accounts.

But when you’re juggling hundreds of thousands of keywords across multiple search engines, and your competitor is breathing down your proverbial neck, a tool is essential to ensure you’re not leaving money on the table. And in the time saved you (or your SEM specialist) can work on other important aspects of PPC campaign management.

We’ve experienced this first-hand and want to share the findings with you. To learn how automated bid management can increase productivity and improve the performance of a manually optimized campaign by over 20%, attend our webcast on Oct 1, 2009 at 12pm PT.

Contributed by Amrita Ramkumar

On Monday June 15, we will be releasing the new Position2 logo, site and solution set. After being in this search and social media marketing game for a while, we realized that by standardizing our technology and processes, we can enable continuous growth for a much wider array of customers.  We’ve been working round the clock on our technology development and will release a new suite of products based on our Surround and Intent Marketing methodology. These offerings grouped as Online Brand Solutions, Customer Acquisition Solutions and Technology Solutions.

Thanks to our current clients who helped us get to this point. Thanks to the Position2 team for burning the midnight oil to put all this together while taking good care of our clients.

From Brand Defender to Performance Leads to our Autobid Engine, our suite of products will encompass everything a marketer needs to enable continuous growth in a flat economy. Our offerings are data driven and encompass best-in-class technology developed through real life customer experience. Social Media Marketing, SEO, PPC, media planning & buying, creative and technology are all ingredients to these customer focused solutions. They are baked in together rather than separate activities.

As Rafiki said in my son’s favorite movie, “It is time.”

Feel free to let us know what you think.

Best,
Rajiv