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Do You Prefer Automated Bidding Or Manual Bidding?

atomic76

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I've been doing paid search since 2003, so a majority of the time I've done it all manually, based off of a pricing model that I created which tracked the performance of individual keywords and ad groups and campaigns and calculated out a maximum Cost Per Click that I could pay and maintain my established profit margin, based on the historical conversion rates of the keyword, ad group, or campaign.

The only time I had started to use some automated bidding was when Google rolled out their bid optimizer in AdWords back around 2007-2008. I tested it on a few campaigns, and while it did eventually start to work pretty reliably, there was some time up front where it was performing poorly until it built up enough conversion history.

At one of the companies I worked for, where we were spending quite a lot on PPC (around $1MM per month), we did eventually enter into a relationship with one of the more popular SEM/SEO agencies and handed our campaigns over to them to manage, but it ended up being a total disaster. Not only were they not meeting our CPA goals, but they drove down volume as they drove down bids, and their monthly management fees completely killed the profitability of that channel in our company, so we eventually had to end the engagement and bring everything back in house.

Needless to say, it's a huge headache trying to go from a bid management tool back to bidding manually, because you basically loose all your historical data. It's near impossible to to make sense of their bid history, since it was all occurring in varying intervals - so you might pull a report for a weeks worth of traffic on a keyword and see that the Max CPC is actually lower than the Average CPC, because their tool was raising and lowering the bids multiple times during that time frame.

Another huge headache is getting rid of all their tracking URLs and replacing them all with your own - since these are now seen as new URLs in the PPC accounts, so pulling reports by URL means you're basically starting from scratch in terms of historical data.

Then you have to deal with issues such as instances where perhaps their automated bid rules pushed bids down too much on certain keywords and you have to start stepping them up incrementally again to find out where they should actually be at.

Personally I still prefer to do my bidding manually, and in some cases use some of the new bid rule features of AdWords. Any other's have an opinion on doing it manually vs. trusting automation?
 
I am using bing ads right now. First I set automatic bidding then wait and take a deep look which are converting more. It I am satisfied with ROI then I don't change anything but If not then I change it to the manual. It all about strategy.
 
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