3rd Party Bid MGT & Google APIs

How do you calculate?

[Williamsburg]

Hello...

We are a small company trying to do PPC the right way. Currently, we use AtlasOnePoint (AOP) for bid management.

Here's my pain point... AOP over-estimates my bid costs by 50% to 60%. How can I accurately understand ROI, let alone make bid decisions with inaccurate costs?

Can anyone speculate how the new API will affect this issue?

Do you work Excel to get accurate info now? Any tips about where I should for templates to do this type of analyses?

[shorebreak]

Google's traffic estimator is off by 30%+ at a keyword level, over 70% of the time, and that is a fundamental flaw that they've shown no ability to fix.

That said, if you are relying on AOP it will be impossible for you to make good bid decisions given that AOP requires keyword-level traffic data from Google to make its decisions.

The only way around this (if you're using AOP) is to build from scratch your own Google Traffic Estimator, which is no small endeavor.

[Williamsburg]

shorebreak thanks for the reply.

Even from a straight reporting standpoint...

Are there any good products that'll allow me to download cost data from Adwords on a daily basis and marry it conversion data?

I want to answer the question... What does keyword1 convert better at position 2 vs. position 3? How does day of the week affect this analysis?

[johnser]

Our plan for the next few days is to use the API to download cost data daily & then integrate it with our own conversion tracking software - which should give us everything we could ever want!