Do you Think Bid Management is Simple? Think Again…

On the surface PPC bid management seems to be about reducing bids for keywords that do not hit your targets and increasing bids for those that do. The reality though is far more complex.

It is quite possible that the fundamental objective of your PPC (Pay per Click) campaigns is to drive the most relevant traffic to your site. It is also quite likely that you want these searchers to take certain actions on your site that add value to your marketing and sales efforts. These actions or conversions can be a sale/purchase, a whitepaper download, a form fill etc…

Needless to say each of these actions has a different level of importance to your business; therefore investing the same amount of your budget to acquire all these different conversions does not make sense. Meaning, having the same cost per conversion/cost per acquisition for all keywords that drive these conversions does not make business sense. Accordingly, the bid management for such keywords cannot be governed by a blanket bidding strategy.

As you develop your bidding strategy it is important to keep in mind that search engines have a major role to play in the bid price you pay and in turn your keyword ranking. Let’s take Google for example. Today Google determines the actual cost of your keywords with a series of complex calculations including Quality Score, Cost per Click (CPC), relevancy of your landing pages etc. only further making the bid price assignment more complex.

Combine this complexity with the sheer volume of keywords you need to manage. How confident are you of the CPCs you picked for your keywords? How well positioned are you to manage your keywords in today’s complex and dynamic search space? Attempting to even calculate an accurate keyword bid price manually can be a daunting task. But a sophisticated automated way of managing bids can help maximize your time as well as your marketing ROI.

Position²’s AutoBid Engine™

At Position2 we have developed a sophisticated AutoBid Engine™ to dramatically improve performance across our clientele. The AutoBid Engine™ is designed to accurately manage bids for individual keywords to achieve your ROI objectives. This is virtually impossible on manual and rule based bid management systems.

Reasons why you should consider Position²’s AutoBid Engine™:

• This proprietary tool is designed on a prediction model, one that can, based on your historic performance, forecast and recommend optimal bid prices down to an individual keyword level.
• Our technology is especially useful when your campaigns have multiple conversions, each of whose importance is different for your business. Using this tool you can custom define the weight for each conversion and let the system optimize your campaigns.
• The advanced algorithms emulate the search engine bid environment on a real-time basis and assess if your campaigns are performing at the optimal potential. Appropriate decisions are made based on the findings and your goals.
• The automated platform also allows campaign managers to expand keywords exponentially. It helps discover keywords fast and efficiently.

Your gains from the AutoBid Engine™:

• A customized tool for your business/industry to maximize results on your marketing investments per your ROI requirements.
• Increase in market share and profitability by predictably estimating and scaling up paid search campaigns to adapt to your marketing goals.
• Save time in managing complex campaigns with hassle-free integration of bidding and reporting engines.

Conclusion

Complexity with the search engine algorithms is here to stay and so is the uncertainty with users’ actions on your site, i.e. uncertainty about most of your keywords performance. A marketer who has found the right way to work with these forces is more likely to be successful in his/her PPC efforts compared to those who make decisions based on short term and on inadequate or unclear keyword data.

Your employees can be expected to make best decisions with the experience and knowledge they have. But to best utilize their expertise you need the right tools. Having Position²’s AutoBid Engine™ on your side means just that. With its unique algorithm it is designed to cater to every unique need of your business and to help you maximize returns from your PPC campaigns.

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Is it true that we have to set a CPC bid limit when we’re using automatic bidding?

The above question will be answered in the following paragraphs.

With automatic bidding, the Search Engine Marketing systems (like: Adwords, Adcenter & Search Marketing) adjust the bids automatically to earn the most clicks possible within the given budget. It isn’t possible to set a specific CPC bid. However, we can set an upper limit on the CPC bids for the entire campaign. This is the CPC bid limit. Specify a bid limit and the Search Engine Marketing system will never bid over the specified limit for any single click.

If it’s important for us to control the cost of individual clicks on our ad, it’s good to specify a CPC bid limit. Say if we sell a product that costs $5.00, we may wish to set a CPC bid limit of $5.00 maximum, so we never pay more than the maximum limit for a click.

By setting a limit we have more control over our costs, but we also may restrict the ad position or the number of click the ads receive. If we choose not to set a click price limit, automatic bidding will function the same way as it normally does, choosing whatever maximum CPC bids it determines will earn the most clicks possible within the set budget.

If a lot more control is required from our end on a day-to-day basis, manual bidding for clicks will be the best advised process to go for. Nevertheless for long campaigns & low budgets, Auto bidding is very useful.

Here are 3 key points which will help us understand the working of Automatic Bidding

• When you place a bid, you enter the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for the item. The seller and other bidders don’t know your maximum bid.

• We’ll place bids using the automatic bid increment amount, which is based on the current high bid. We’ll bid only if it’s necessary to make sure that we remain the high bidder, or to meet the reserve price, up to our maximum amount.

• If another bidder places the same maximum bid or higher, we’ll place another bid. Our maximum bid is kept confidential until it is exceeded by another bidder.

Contributed by Leo V J

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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

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A significant portion of the process of managing PPC campaigns is keyword bid management. The sheer volumes of keywords, its interaction with each other and the highly competitive search engine bid environment makes it a challenge worth automating!

The Position2 AutoBid Engine can predict keyword positions for each bid and provide recommendations to maximize the revenue. This short article covers the overall framework of our engine.

Most companies start off its bid management with a heuristic rule based bidding model. The next level is adding statistical and probabilistic analysis to the historical  information. The biggest challenges in this are:

1. Identifying variables to model and how each of these variable have a effect on other models? This include – Conversion rates, click through rates (CTR), Click/CPC history, average position & discounting.
2. How to model variable for keywords which do not have sufficient data ? Long tail keywords may have very few impression let alone clicks and conversions.
3. How relevant is historical data ? The speed at which the internal marketing focus, competition, consumer preference & search engine algorithms change, makes it difficult to work on very old data.

Even after modeling each keyword, the choice of taking a risk of one keyword against another always remains. Should all keywords be treated at par or should you risk a higher bid for a keyword which is at its tipping point? With constraints such as budget limitation, what is an optimal solution to maximize revenue?

Once these engineering challenges are solved, the question that persists is the value of simple bid management or using manual intervention to improve quality score by improving ad-copy and landing pages.

Our AutoBid Engine automates the tedious process of bid-management and frees up our analysts to focus on improving the quality of keywords, adcopy and landing pages. It goes beyond rules-based bidding and employs ROI portfolio optimization techniques to maximize profit and volume over user defined criteria.  We will be opening it for customers as part of our newly launched product offering.

Here is another article that you might find interesting -  http://searchenginewatch.com/3626132

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