Managing and optimizing your paid search campaigns to their full potential takes (a lot of) time, effort and can quickly become frustrating.
Because it is done manually and regularly, bid optimisation is probably one of the most laborious tasks in PPC campaign management. You could be optimizing bids for various reasons: Decreasing your average CPCs to maximise your budget, improving the coverage of your converting keywords, or making sure you’re spending your dollars in the most effective way. Whatever your reason is, note that bid management is one of those tasks that you can already automate via bid management tools. A wide range of these tools are available although it will lead to an additional cost and can impact negatively the efficiency of your campaigns. Besides bid management, most other tasks are still manual.
Well, the time has come for us to welcome Google’s official tool to automate part of campaign management: the Adwords automated rules.
- How many times have you had to put yourself a reminder to pause promotional ads & resume old ones?
- How many times have you realised that important keywords in your account had fallen under the first page minimum bid without you noticing?
- How many times have you had to re-adjust your campaign daily budget limits because the client is asking you why his ads are not showing?
These are some of the questions that can now be fixed, thanks to Google Adwords’ long-awaited automated rules.
Campaign management tools have used, in most cases, bid management as their strongest asset. However, now that Google has released the exact same functionality, I ask myself:
Is this the end of bid management tools?
Well, the answer is probably no, but they will probably take a hit from this release.
These tools have evolved to incorporate additional functionalities such as integrating databases, advanced reporting or even consolidating your paid search activity which normally could be spread on every corner of the web (different networks, different search engines, different regions, etc).
While most blue-chip clients may still require campaign management tools, small and medium size advertisers can easily save some money by avoiding them and sticking to Google.
Please take part of the discussion by leaving a comment below.
*Please note that this feature is only available to advertisers in the US at the moment but we will let you know when it is rolled out in Australia.