Point taken that the traditional “set it and go” approach doesn’t work, but again, lots of firms are doing data mining (a prerequisite for bid management).
Many firms have build the ability to take situations, weight recent data more heavily, or factor in assists.
Cross ExaminationConducting the cross: If I have a lower CPC than you do for the same position on the same keyword, how can bid management help you win out? Haven’t I already won the auction?
You should optimize your returns for search. It’s a foundation by which you’re enabled to do other things. Bid management is the one thing you don’t want to spend a lot of time on but you have to. It saps your resources if you’re not managing it in a scalable way. Bid management allows you to focus your attention on areas outside your campaign that are valuable and quickly react. Real search marketers look at search marketing outside of just a bid placement tool. They don’t just look at immediate return. A keyword is just as important as your television ad. You can’t make it great just by bid management alone. It needs human influence—industry, consumer and marketer. It’s not just math. You limit yourself & search marketing and it will go away if you think of it as “just a keyword” and “just a bid.” Peter (side A) [the dead side]
All major search engines are going toward quality score/lack of transparency. It’s been frustrating, but it’s put the M back in SEM. Previously, people thought of it as math. At the end of the day, it’s marketing. We need to look at all variables and factors. Jeffery (Moderator): I think we’ve reached a consensus: it’s certainly not dead, but what’s changed is the kind of prominence it takes in your campaign Audience Q&A
The current bid management system is designed to support the traditional media ad buy. When it goes to the public free, the public won’t be in that model. Will the game change again? Also, with new Google Analytics, we can see that in some ways it’s smarter than Urchin; in other ways we can see that it’s dumbed down. What’s in the future for bid management tools? (Sorry, a lot of the time I couldn’t see who was answering the questions)
All of these services will have some capabilities for helping advertisers optimize their campaigns in all media formats. Some standards can be worked out on transmission and privacy of data. There’s a scenario 5-10 years out where bid management is offered by networks themselves, but we’re a ways away from that because of low trust. Despite Google Analytics, the total marketshare by independent firms is an order of magnitude bigger than what search engines provide.
Good point with Google Analytics. It’s hard to speculate, but that’s in line with the expertise that search marketers have today; less well-versed in web analytics.
Jeffrey: Poll for the panel. How many think that networks will offer direct bid management (fully integrated in their systems) in 5 years? 10 years?They’re already offering that to some extent. Will it displace third party management?
I’d have to say is that markets want to be efficient. At some point a search engine will force advertisers to be more efficient with a CPA system instead of the current system. That’s still a good 5 years out. Until then, most people will trust themselves or third parties before trusting search engines. There’s the example of the Panama roll out in Asia . Can you give us examples of ways you’re taking strategy & implementing it to manage thousands of keywords?
Misty: Like, how are we utilizing bid management tools? I think that some keywords are good for bringing awareness (not purchases)—you can’t measure that in ROI. We use bid management to become more efficient—uploading and downloading data, dayparting. We do a lot to promote online and offline keywords. In a high peak period, the bid tool sees when clicks aren’t converting and will take them down. For example, Nike bidding on [lebron james] during basketball season. The ads aren’t converting so it takes it down. The rest of the year, it runs.
Measurements of engagement with target audience. If you can figure out the value of those interactions with your target marketing in terms of brand building, you can use a keyword management system for the process of optimizing for that task. The notion you can measure things is what makes people spend ad money online.
(for Peter & Misty): I’ve never heard of bid management as commodity. Do you really feel that? (for Robert): When you managed Expedia, did you feel bid management solutions & tools were a commodity?I’ve seen campaigns run with Excel spreadsheets—but there’s an inherent risk in that. At Expedia, we saw improvement in the things where we didn’t know there were issues. Long tail is good for bid management; it’s almost impossible to do manually. Yahoo has gone away from having that transparency. I don’t think it’s a commodity, but a limited, scarce resource. Also, targets shift.
Misty: About 3 years ago, we did a study comparing the bid management tools. All have the same basic checklist, all are rule-based, have basic skill sets. Some have more advanced specialties. But it still doesn’t allow for all influences to be calculated in. If a system can be gamed, it will be. Bid management is in the process of dying. There are a whole bunch more parameters & that number is increasing. Robots & engineers will take it over. But everyone here has to learn how all the different parameters work so we can optimize better, market better. (Okay, it’s a statement.)There’s a really straightforward way to describe systems in search. If you look at the Japanese search marketing or the European market today, all they have to do to succeed today is to buy keywords. Bidding is not as competitive. The evolution of search marketing is to a.) do basic things and find kw, and b.) do testing. You don’t need bid management there. But as advertisers learn those, they advance—they hit the ceiling beyond which best practices don’t help anymore. The massive amounts of historical data can’t be utilized. The role of a bid management system isn’t to take campaigns to the next level but to make data usable. I think that it’s absolutely not a commodity because most advertisers are getting to the point where everyone here knows what they’re doing, but we still are overwhelmed by data. Search engines won’t solve it; they care about revenue per query, not ROI. Misty: I agree that you can get to a point where analytics don’t help further, but if you get to that point, you need to expand your campaign. You’re just looking at your keywords. Last month’s data is almost irrelevant at this point. If you’re hitting a ceiling, you need to optimize your campaign but you can’t just look at your keywords alone.
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