shorebreak - 6:08 pm on Mar 17, 2004 (gmt 0)

Great thread, to which I'll add that at some *some* automated bid mgmt systems beat manual bid mgmt hands down when the # of keywords gets into the thousands or hundreds of thousands and spend amounts into six-seven figures per month.

While it's relatively straightforward for a human to regularly monitor the small number of keywords you're talking about, human intervention breaks down at even modest scale (say 1000 keywords). Case in point, if there are, say, 5 bid positions of meaningful volume across 1000 keywords, that means there are 5 to the 1000th power potential scenarios, one of which is ideal at any particular point in time. That number of scenarios can *only* be evaluated by software, not humans.

Every time I make this argument, manually-powered agency types argue till their veins bulge out of their foreheads, but the truth is in Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS).