High End PPC Bid Managament, Anyone Use Or Experienced In PPC Bid Software

[Brad123]

Anyone use or have used PPC bid managament software, if so what did you use and did you find it useful, what advantages over manually managing an account did you get when using the software.

Do you find you can only manage a PPC account manually for so long untill it gets to a certain size.

[Shane]

The high end market is full of slick suited salesmen with even slicker flash presentations about how they can uplift ROI by xx% for their small fee of 5% to 20% of spend,

At the high end some will even want you to pass the account over to their agency account so they can get the google best practice (contradiction in terms if ever I heard one) funding kickback on topof the 5% to 15% they'll charge you too.

As you are looking to use the tools that agencies do, where expert adwords knowledge isn't such a high priority as the budgets are huge and expectations are small you'll find things are disproportionately expensive.

Personally I think half of them have no clue what's really cooking but then again they usually deal with media agencies or some big brand's in house marketing team who are invariably clueless compared to most good affiliate PPC specialists.

the bigger ones are searchrev, efrontier, esearchvision etc. , and vary from a £0 to £10k set up fee (lots of work.. seeing as it's set up the same day heh )and 5% to around 20% of ad spend with monthly minimum fees from about £3k

There are other alternatives out there and they all vary in cost, flexibility and effectiveness, it really boils down to how much you want the software to do and how much you wish to do as there's a trade off between automation, control and cost.

the cheaper options are limited in function but can work well on some campaigns where a fixed cpa is defined.

[hpops]

Or you could talk to Shane, or even us about managing your account for you, we'd probably look at and then dismiss most bid management solutions as overpriced and ineffectual compared to a methodical, granular and manual approach, charge you considerably less and deliver a service focused on you rather than a set of processes.

TD also have a product that they bought for a vastly inflated price, but in fairness, it is quite good (the click-weighting function is v. nice)

[Brad123]

Hi, not looking for any PPC services, im a qualified Google Adwords Professional myself and run my own SEO, PPC business, I was just curious as to bid software and if seen as a useful tool, me I prefer the manual approach, time consuming yes but worked for me so far.

[tbp]

I`ve never used packaged software, but did create my own using the Adwords API's.

At the time I was running a massive campaign for someone else, and I wrote a desktop application that polled google every 15 minutes and pulled all the data out of, and also pulled sales database from the merchants data. It then linked the two so I could see exactly which campaigns and keywords were making sales, and it also monitored the position of the adwords ad's.

It did make life much easier, as it saved a huge amount of time and manual work. The campaigns were in a very competitive area, so it was a case of monitoring them constantly, and upping or lowering the CPC's on an hourly basis to maintain the best positions and ROI's.

In terms of ROI, it did make a difference and the campaign was a lot more profitable than a similar one the year before, purely because I could react much quicker to changes, and squeeze every penny out of the campaigns.

As I said, I have never used packaged tools, but if they did a similar thing to the application I created, then they would help.

[Azam.net]

Originally Posted by Shane The high end market is full of slick suited salesmen with even slicker flash presentations about how they can uplift ROI by xx% for their small fee of 5% to 20% of spend, At the high end some will even want you to pass the account over to their agency account so they can get the google best practice (contradiction in terms if ever I heard one) funding kickback on topof the 5% to 15% they'll charge you too.

You're absolutely right. Chatted to a couple of bid management software companies at the TMF event in Earl's Court today and they were trying to flog pretty average PPC software for 5.5% and 7% of the cost of the keyword click. I told them that, with the clients we have on a percentage ad spend basis, that is a huge chunk of the revenue.