Omniture SearchCenter
Marin Software
Efficient Frontier
Dart Search
internally-built product
Did-It (Maestro)
WebTrends
SearchRev
The list above is ranked based on the frequency with which I've encounted various tools 'in consideration' (as distinct from 'in place') when talking with advertisers (most of whom spend $100K+/mo on search). The list below is based on my subjective view of what the best tools are:
Omniture SearchCenter
Efficient Frontier
Kenshoo
Marin Software
Lastly, below is another ranking based on how often advertisers I talk to are using a particular tool:
Dart Search
Omniture SearchCenter
Efficient Frontier
Did-It
internally-built product
Marin Software
SearchRev
There you will meet people working for companies that are actually using bid management tools everyday and who can give you real feedback on their pros and cons.
I don't have any first-hand experience with WT's optimization math, but any SEM firm that claims to have advantageous math should be able to get you comfortable that they have the following:
1)Appropriate math background/skills. If the SEM firm doesn't have a team with a strong applied math/statistics background, then you should run away. As detailed recently in this great Business Week article [businessweek.com], great quantitative/algorithm minds are extremely rare, and if your SEM firm's braintrust hasn't cut its teeth taking risks in applying math, you can bet they won't have the skills you'll need to beat your competitors at anything other than trading baseball cards.
2) Predictive Modelling Capabilities - the natural result of a set of algorithms that can leverage historical and actual impression/click/cost/revenue/margin data across a large keyword set is - surprise! - predictive models that can show the advertiser all of the possible efficient operating points for that keyword set. If an SEM firm claims portfolio optimization capabilities, ask to talk to a client of theirs and ask that client a) if they have access to keyword portfolio ROI models specific to their account; b) if those models are accurate; and c) if those models can look backwards and forwards.
3) Accurate Google AdWords Click Model - applying portfolio algorithms to PPC is useless unless your algorithms can see through Google's opaque marketplace. Unlike Yahoo Search Marketing (at least until Panama), AdWords doesn't tell you what CPC will yield what bid position, and if you simply take Google's Traffic Estimator at its word you'll be basing decisions on data that's off by 40%+, 70% of the time. Ask the SEM firm how they estimate traffic on Google, and if they say "Google has a handy traffic estimator", run away and don't look back. Also, go to the next level of proof and ask one of their clients whether or not they get access to keyword-level *and* portfolio-level traffic forecasts, and whether those forecasts have been accurate over time. I'll bet if you do this that you get blank stares back from the SEM firm.
4) Efficient Learning Methodologies - if an SEM is truly leveraging modeling algorithms, then in addition to getting more volume and/or margin out of a campaign, they should be able to learn about new keywords, tail keywords, and under-explored keywords efficiently - meaning spending as little as possible and in a controlled fashion to learn as much as can be learned about those keywords. What does proof of this look like? Well, for starters they should be able to explain what their learning methodology is, how it's built into their system, and how they leverage sparse data sets. If they can't do that, show them the door or expect any learning they get on your keyword portfolio to be incomplete... or expensive.
5) Effective Recency Strategy - in keyword optimization, recency is the notion of weighting recent data more or less heavily than historical data to take into account seasonality, inventory, promotions, and market volatility, among others; practically, it should also take into account inaccurate or incomplete historical data that if taken at face value would lead any optimization astray. Here again, don't just throw the SEM firm a softball; instead ask the open-ended question "What does recency in search marketing mean to you and how do you take it into account when optimizing campaigns?" If their answer isn't satisfactory, head for the hills.
WebTrends Dynamic Search comes via acquisition of ClickShift, a Palo Alto-based SEM startup that sold to WebTrends within 1.5 years of inception and before they got much traction with paying clients (in the VC world that’s known as ‘dumping a failure’). Their market position is that they sit one tier above portfolio optimization because they bid on each kw across massive sets and use their analytics data to also optimize on other variables such as ad copy, landing page, geo, demo. The notion of testing *every* variable in an SEM campaign sounds reasonable, but the reality is that if you test each & every possible variable, you won’t have enough data to optimize – and that’s the rookie weakness I’ve seen in practice with their approach. Their clients often complain of unbearably large amounts of budget being spent inefficiently in order to provide data on all variables – unacceptable.
Welcome semsh - here's to healthy competition in 2009!
Thanks
On this side of the atlantic, yahoo and other PPC-programs play only a minor role, google has a market share of over 90 per cent. So, for me, there is currently no need for a tool managing campaigns across different platforms. Nevertheless, in many of the posts I read on both sources, people said it would be a great thing to have just this on the niveau of the adwords editor.
Adwords editor? I'm new. The paranoid in me said: "Don't be naiv bidding "manually" with adwords editor: competitor-folks out there have tools, which may adjust their campaigns every minute, geotargeting streetwise." Obviously they don't?
I'm in a niche-market. A new campaign on some of my widgets shows at best 5000 impressions per week on broad match. Phrases of two words (phrase match) generally give me < 10 clicks per day with a ctr of 15-20% on spot #2. I really love to evaluate my data, but my matrices are so thin, that applying statistics matches reading tea-leaves.
I am currently trying to develop tools for datamining the keyword-data, which I logged when SEO was what it used to be;) I want to finetune my adwords accout with this data using comfortable interfaces via SOAP-API. The first modules indeed worked, but I have some doubts this really makes sense: In contrast to highly competitive areas my competitors seem to get well along with just setting up a campaign on widgets broad match and bid as much as they like.
1) In this situation: Will I really get any advantage bidding a secific amount on "green metal widgets with yellow spots on top" (phrase match) in contrast to someone bidding the same amount on widgets broad match?
2) What could a professional bid-management tool do for me, which the adwords editor does not cover?
Not so sure started looking at one now.
Yepp. I am making fast progress at the moment, and indeed this is the impression I also got.
Decent two or three word phrases seem to perform with extraordinary good ctr. Is this part of googles quality scoring?
In fact I have some patterns like "blue metal widgets" and "metal widgets" set to phrase match in the same adgroup. The former is definitely cheaper, but is IS shown! and clicked. If google was primarily trying to make money, she would prefer to show the latter. But to my impression this is not the case.
To set an adgroup to broad-match and sort out negative keyphrases is a completely different approach. Gives you the chance to log unknown phrases, though, but I am in the lucky situation that I have tons of phrases already successfully logged in the past years.
this week I developed a small tool, which lists some keyphrases drawn from my older logfiles, checks if the phrase is already covered by my adwords account, and -if not- supplies a dropdown menu suggesting adequate target-urls. The list is presorted by frequency of occurance, descending. Via soap-api, I can add the (positive) keyphrase to my account with a single click on the submit-button. Very efficient.
