Bid Management Tools

Is there an advantage to bid management tools

[TheRealTerry]

What are people's experiences with using bid management tools such as MediaBoost vs manual edits. Our in house team does a good job with maintaining our CPLs on the whole, I'm just wondering as we move to start paying more attention to conversion rates with A/B testing of landing pages if it would make sense to have some software that worked to do day to day small bid adjustments at the keyword level.

We have the manpower to do it manually, but would we benefit from freeing up bid management time to focus on other areas, or do these automated systems run the risk of sending us garbage traffic that will increase the amount of poor leads we get?

My apprehension stems from the horrific job that advanced broad match in Google does with matching you to only relevant searches. I don't want some automated system deciding that we could get a bunch of traffic from a popular term that some small nuance makes it irrelevant. Machines aren't good with the finer points of context in my experience.

[PPC_Idiot]

A computer will never perform as well as a person when it comes to bid management. That being said there are many areas that you can use a program to help make the process easier.

[biking4jesus]

there is a list of vendors with tools to do this for you.

[edited by: engine at 12:09 pm (utc) on Mar. 3, 2008]

[Waldo]

A person will never be able to perform as well as a human when it comes to Bid Management.

[TheRealTerry]

Either that's a typo, or a very profound statement, I am still weighing that.

[Waldo]

lol - typo.

I meant to counter PPC_Itiot's comment about humans being better than big management tools.

I think it is important to recognize that big management should always be automated to rules (like ROI or some sort of Avg.Pos/Earnings combo), but monitored by people who can manually alter decisioning.

Keyword selection however, should almost be almost entirely a human decision.

Sorry again for the typo.

- w