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Tender Services

@Dennis: You’ve read something into the article that I didn’t, but I take your point nevertheless. I’m not sure how you can regulate sales people, but educating the buyers is certainly a good thing. We participate in the UK with organisations such as the IAB and e-consultancy to try to do that. No software is completely automating paid search; as I said in the post it’s the blend of technology and people that produces the results. But to dismiss technology out of hand is short-sighted.

@David: I think tracking beyond a transaction on a web site is an important factor. Offline values such as lead quality (which can be easily quantified) are often a challenge for advertisers to supply, but it can be done and is being done. Equally, periods of missing or incorrect data can be excluded. Any technology will be hampered if you give it poor data.

The problem is that the current PPC Management tools can only look at a limited dataset at the same time, while an experienced human can use multiple data points to make inferences.

Bid management tools can’t infer that the reason one ad does better than the other is because the ad copy doesn’t match that keyword… It can just lower the bids on the keyword – not helpful.

Maybe the site was down for a period of time, gotta remove that data from the engine…

“XYZ leads are higher quality”, not in your system, not gonna make a difference.

On the flip side though is the nightmare of (not) doing manual bid management for 10,000 keywords at a shot.

I’ve opted for using a tool that submits the bid change for review, this way, if I have something that I want to veto, I can, while still getting the information I need.

Hopefully, we will get to a point where bid management tools integrate better with analytics (can anyone say the analytics API?) and BI tools.

Will this start requiring a PHD to develop? Yeah, but I think we already need those… (Ohh, this coming from a college dropout).

I would think Nick’s post meant to talk more about the hype that PPC software companies/agencies place on the “magic” bid management, as opposed to greater ROI possible from landing page testing, ad copy, and ad group management. I’ve been on several panels where the black box was foisted unceremoniously on attendees– who are there to learn, not hear vendor pitches about why rules-based bidding doesn’t work or why their company is the solution.

As industry practitioners, we should have a code of ethics (perhaps SEMPO will eventually enforce), that eliminates the chest-pounding, letting clients know PPC success requires both smart tool and smart people. As efficient as EF might be– we have used the express product (albeit streamlined)– the test was a failure because of misrepresentation of the capabilities by an overeager salesperson. That is what causes problems, not the software.

Were PPC truly that automatable, you wouldn’t see headcount in agencies grow in direct proportion to client bases. Yet, the allure of proprietary software is a great weapon for sales. That is what I read from Nick’s post.

I contemplated responding to Nic’s post directly and tackling the inaccuracies point by point, but then decided: “why bother?”

Hopefully the rest of the series will be worth reading, and I hope you’ll join the dialog.

George