Why no talk of keyword management?

[shorebreak]

I've been following WebmasterWorld and SEW for 2 years now, and it just struck me as odd that there are 10 threads about bid management on the Overture thread for every 1 bid mgmt discussion on the AdWords thread.

My own suspicion is that there's no talk about keyword optimization on AdWords because so few vendors' systems are able to work with AdWords' more opaque system.

Thoughts?

[justshelley]

PPC pro recently added that capability but I haven't had time to test it. Tried GoToast about a year ago for Google management and did not like the way it worked at all even after several variations of testing and after analyzing the test stats against manual optimizations. Very good questions. Would also like to hear feedback on this from others because we currently do our own bid adjustments in-house which is very time consuming and limited (typically 3 times a week per client for positioning and budget management).

[shorebreak]

Google's traffic estimator is broken (30%+ off 70% of the time at the individual keyword level), and so we've had to build our own Google traffic estimator, one that actually works; that's made a big difference.

C'mon vendors, let's hear it - how do you take systems designed for Overture's position model and make them work on Google?