Most anything I could come up with is something Jonathan Beeston understands better than I do, though…#:^)

You left a fantastic comment here on Friday last week but unfortunately it was accidently marked as spam by the sites updated Wordpress version.

Comments awaiting moderation get lumped in initially with those already approved and it was accidently removed by myself.

I just wanted to apologise and say I really appreciate the comments you gave, it was a fantastic update on bid management solutions today and I am genuinely upset it was deleted.

Thanks again.

PPCblogger

Why do people who have accepted the need for transparency fail to acknowledge the ability of the tools designed to provide this very feature?

Q: How can one account manager successfully deal with 100,000 keywords across a magnitude of products and product groups, with seasonality effecting the level of interest, whilst fighting off the competition day and night? One man can not cope, nor can a entire office of account execs, without incurring huge overheads and massive communication breaches. Trust me I know more than most.

A: By forecasting the search landscape you are one step ahead of the competition.

Ask your self another question:-

Q: Are you doing anything different to your competitors? Or are your competitors doing something different to you?

The search landscape is warfare - plain and simple and as with every civilization; it is in times of warfare that new and exciting technologies emerge driving our capabilities forward.

Another point if you enter a bidding war for your target terms, why bother bidding at-all, unless you are achieving your optimum yield? None of us are bidding for the sheer fun of it.

Of course technology will never replace the human interaction, landing pages, copy creative, engaging creative, off line campaign drivers etc.,

I say if someone thinks they can do it and and possesses a proven track record of relative achievements wheres the problem? it is really a no-brainer.

But this is of course one mans opinion.

Would it surprise you to know that math-based investment firms account for over a quarter of all the world’s daily securities trading, or that competition for quant jocks is so heated that investment houses don’t even wait for these guys to graduate to start recruiting them from India, Russia, the U.S. and other countries?

My colleague Jonathan is, in fact, making claims that seem far-fetched to many of you. It will take us all of 5 minutes, though, to prove that we can effectively model impressions, clicks, effective CPC, resultant bid position, revenues and margins for our clients within Google’s opaque, QS-laden AdWords system, both within each keyword and across large keyword sets.

I’ve been spending the last 4 years getting advertisers to *believe*, so to speak, and it’s no easy feat. For starters, try convincing an advertiser who has no pain that they will, at some point in the future, hit a ceiling in their PPC campaign beyond which they can’t extract additional revenue and/or margin. Human nature is such that most of us (including, scarily enough, most people at publicly-traded companies that depend on online marketing for growth) need to feel pain before we’re ready to step outside of the box.

The reason Mr Beeston and I spend most of our time dealing with advertisers spending $100K-$1M+/mo on ppc is that those large ppc advertisers - and not the recent or even mid-size ppc advertisers - are the ones who are at or near that ceiling.

They know from experience that the limitations of manual keyword management can hurt a *business*, if not the SEM/SEO consultants who get paid more for the manually-intense ppc mgmt of that business.

They also know from experience that lack of strategic visibility into what efficient ppc campaign operating points are possible eventually results in a big miss and a 10-30% hit on their stock price. THAT’s when all the religious wars and marketing B.S. go out the window and the CFO steps in demanding the actual forward visibility he was told search and online marketing would bring.

Who can argue that marketing is quickly becoming a never-ending math calculation? Sure there’s the work humans will forever be better equipped to handle - ad copy creations, landing page creation, knowing what bets to make, etc - but keyword bid management is becoming a world of algorithms both at Google and at the advertiser.

And for the naysayers about EF’s technology, then I’m happy to respond to your calls of BS. Perhaps this isn’t the right forum, but feel free to get in touch: jonathan dot beeston at efrontier dot com.

But there are so many factors involved (not just your own but those around you) that are almost impossible to calculate and are constantly changing, which means these tools will ultimately still always be just be that - an estimate. Which is not saying they are without use (as I mention above).

The way you have expressed it, makes it sound a bit like this particular tool has it nailed down to a simple bid to position model - although I haven’t used the tool, I am willing to bet that isn’t the case.

Moving on - What is really going to make 3rd party bid management solutions stand out?

Most already offer a simple integrated system for monitoring and management, but I think a lot of advertisers and agencies want more. I certainly think the future of 3rd party bid management solutions is more about delivering ROI / CPA rules that really provide significant performance increases over manual optimisation.

Will Google and Microsoft try and develop these further and intergrate? Or will we have to rely on the 3rd party independant offerings / in-house systems?

Paid search isn’t that different. The key is having the right brains in place to use all these statistical techniques so you can build the models and make predictions. We have 6 PhDs doing this full time, which I bet is 6 more than other bid management companies have.

BTW, I think we can all agree that this is an interesting debate!