PPC & Bid Management Tools
The products and services reviewed in this section of our website focus primarily on 2 distinct elements of internet marketing aimed at optimizing your advertising efforts and maximizing your return on investment (ROI):
Some of the PPC tools and Bid Management tools reviewed herein provide one or the other of these categories of service, some provide both. Your decision on which to pursue depends chiefly upon your current needs/goals and your existing resources (money, software/hardware, people-power, and time).
This article will familiarize you with these two critical services – the benefits they offer and the typical features the tools in each category provide – and leave you armed with the ability to better discern which of the companies we’ve reviewed will help you to best achieve all your business goals at a price you can afford.
Automated Campaign Management
You’ll see it described many ways, almost invariably with the word “automated” included somewhere, but whatever they name it, the convenience is the same. An automated bidding tool allows you to set certain parameters by which the software program will automatically submit, alter, pause, and rescind your bids on your behalf.
The obvious convenience of automated bidding and keyword management is that you have more time and energy to focus on other things that can’t be automated. The real bonus, however, is that the automated program will almost invariably do a better, more thorough and precise job of managing your bids moment-to-moment than any human being.
Services vary in the number and complexity of the parameters that users can set, the simplest being a Maximum Bid up to which the program incrementally bids in an effort to get your listing the best ranking possible.
Other features common to automated campaign management tools include:
Target Rank – There are many reasons why you many not wish to strive for number 1 ranking on certain listings, most commonly that the spot is too competitive compared to the bids just one or two positions lower in rank. Setting a Target Rank lets you let the big boys duke it out while you sit back and enjoy more of your advertising capital to put to work for you elsewhere (and a comfy spot in a ranking almost as good).
Minimum Bid – Sometimes it pays to set a minimum bid as well, assuring that your ad budget doesn’t trickle away on listings placed at ridiculously low rankings that no one is likely to see, much less click on.
Budgets – Many automated bidding services let you set a daily, weekly, or monthly budget so that you don’t blow your whole wad (so to speak) all at once. Spreading your ad spending out over a reasonable period of time assures that you’ll more likely attract a wider array of potential visitors.
Scheduling/Pausing – When it comes to capturing targeted traffic, not all moments in time are equal. Maybe your target market is made up of mostly night owls who never surf the net between 9 and 5. Maybe your target market only surfs during the week and doesn’t come near a computer screen during the weekends and holidays. Maybe your site is temporarily down and any traffic driven to your site during those times will only send visitors to annoying error pages.
Whatever the reason, there are many instances when setting up an automatic schedule for pausing and reactivating your campaign, or defining scenarios during which your campaign automatically pauses or reactivates, can save you and company unbelievable amounts of money.
Set your campaigns to run only when your target audience is most likely to be online and you practically assure yourself a greater return on your investment.
Day Parting – This is a type of scheduling that lets you set up two different bid structures for two different times of day, usually called a Primary and a Secondary campaign.
Bid Jamming – This devious but effective tactic forces your competitors to always pay their maximum bid, in essence chomping away at their advertising budget and, ideally, driving them out of the running.
Gap Fixing – A “gap” is the cost differential between bids for two consecutive ranks. Tools with Gap Fixing automatically adjust your bid to just 1 cent above the bid for the rank below you. Avoid scenarios where you pay more than you need to just to get the rank you desire.
An automated campaign management service worth its salt should provide automated email (or SMS or voice) notifications each and every time a change takes place. The interface should be easy to learn and follow.
Some of the larger and fancier bid management tools offer unique and innovative variations and improvements on these tools. Some will change your bid to keep you placed 1 position above or below a competitor or friendly site, for example.
Some have even invented their own advanced tools based other metrics entirely. The best (and usually more expensive) automated services generate customizable forms for you to analyze the effectiveness of your automated campaign.
But that falls more in the range of our next category…
Web Analytics
An effective campaign relies on the sound and logical analysis of relevant data and the prompt institution of appropriate changes based on conclusions drawn. Web analytics are software tools that research various data relevant to your company, your marketing campaigns, and your target audience, then organize it all into user-friendly formats – tables, charts, graphs, reports – that facilitate you ability to interpret it all.
The variety of data these tools study is staggering. A few of the most common are listed below, but keep in mind this is an incomplete list, and one of the primary qualities that distinguishes one analytics tool from another is the variety, range, and usefulness (or relevance) of the selection of analytics they offer:
Clicks: Study clicks to your site, through your site, and out of your site. Learn where your visitors came from, who they are, and where they’re going. Distinguish 1st time visitors (unique hits) from repeat visitors. Identify which visitors came from your paid search marketing efforts (SEM) and which came from free, “organic” (SEO) searches.
Conversions: Find out exactly how many visits resulted in a sale and study the differences between the visitors that complete a sale from those that abandon a shopping cart from those that never make it to the checkout counter at all.
Paths: Analyze the paths visitors took through your site. Discover the lengths of visitors’ sessions on a single page or your whole site. Uncover popular paths through your site and optimize them to lead visitors fluidly to your goal page (checkout counter, request for information, newsletter/mailing list signup, etc.).
Keywords: Track results by individual keyword. Learn which words drive the most traffic to your site and which ones result in conversions. Sort the wheat from the chaff in the blink of an eye.
Geographic Data: Isolate results from specific localities. Compare and contrast the effectiveness of campaigns targeting different countries or continents.
Calendar Data: Sort results by hour, day, week, month, year. Track trends, find lulls. Chart your target audience’s annual schedule and learn to time your campaign flawlessly.
Click Fraud – Identify suspicious and costly clicks perpetrated by competitors and other malevolents and sometimes by PPC search engines themselves, whether manually or by bot or spider. Whatever the cause, whatever the purpose or intention, clicks from visitors that have absolutely no intention of utilizing your service or purchasing your product can cost you dearly. Investigating potential sources of such “click spamming” and taking action against it will end up saving you a ton of money in the long run.
Metrics: Many analytics calculate certain figures typical to the search engine marketing industry, such as ROI (return on investment), KEI (keyword efficiency index), ROAS (return on ad spending), average CPA (cost per acquisition), average CPC (cost per click), conversion rate.
Once an analytics tool collects all this information, its job is far from done. Now it must organize all these facts and figures into easily readable and interpretable formats. When evaluating the appropriateness of a particular analytics tool for your needs, look at both the types of data the program collects and the methods it uses to display the results.
Reports that are customizable are best, as are reports that can be integrated/compared with one another within the program. Some users will appreciate tools that let you export reports to Microsoft Excel, CSV, PDF, or other format.
An analytics tool should help you track trends, identify patterns, develop, compare and implement new strategies, evaluate results,
One last difference between the many PPC and Bid Management Tools reviewed in this site is whether the tool comes as an installable desktop application or a subscription-based, web application. The differences are quite simple:
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A downloadable desktop application can be purchased for a one-time fee and requires certain system hardware and software and requires you to download, install, and run the program all yourself.
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a subscription-based web application charges a monthly or annual fee for its use and you don’t have to clutter up your hard drive, and the service does much of the management for you.
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