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Will I be doing it wrong if I use it in terms of :
below $0.50 - Auto
and above $0.50 - Fixed
or it's better to target according to the niche rather than the dollar amounts?
"or it's better to target according to the niche rather than the dollar amounts?" It's better to make decisions according to your ROI (Return On Investment). Funny that ROI means king in french so you can say: ROI is king. Run a search on this site with ROI or Auto Bid (autobid also).
You can get some really great prices by bidding say : $1.00 for a term that puts you at #3, that the next lower bidder is paying 57 cents for; you actually pay 58 cents for that $1.00 auto bid. And you keep out competition that does not want to go higher than your $1.00 bid. They can't bid 59 cents and get your #3 bid; they only get the 4th place bid and replace the the competitor who is paying 57 cents.
I don't think so, anymore than responding to fixed bids by your competitors under the old entirely fixed bid system.
I have found the new system beneficial. Especially if you watch your bids carefully and frequently.
For example, under AutoBid: if someone bids $1 to be # 1 and #2 bids 99 cents and you, the number 3, bid 98 cents, but the number 4 is 67 cents -- #1 and #2 lose, as neither can maneuver too much, especially #1. But you at number 3 are paying only 68 cents though you bid 98 cents.
If someone below wants to be at least #3 (which is the minimum of where you want to be on Overture for good results) they have to bid above 98 cents. If they do, you can give up #3 and keep your 98 cents bid and still be paying only 68 cents. Now you are #4 and lose position. But the guy who outbid you is now actually paying 98 cents. Not the 68 cents you were paying.
I have found not many want to stay there once they discover (given enough time) what they pay in return for the sales obtained. Because they are actually paying what they bid.
Sometimes the price variance between #3 and #4 is not as great as the example I used, but often it is. And the folks below #3 really rarely are willing to get to that bid level for #2 or #3.
Do my competitors feel the same as I do, and do as I do? Sometimes, but a lot of them are big corporations and they don't spend the time and effort to monitor that carefully their bids. So a small and quick enterprenuer can manipulate the system to his advantage -- sometimes.
Does Overture make money on this new system? I hope they do, otherwise they could not stay in business and we could not have what they and other PPCs offer. The only real question is whether the price we pay is worth the service rendered.
Nothing is free, and the early free days of the web (ca 1997-98)are gone. They were never really free: dumb investors paid for the dot.coms gone bust who tried to do "free" and now we pay, or our customers do. But somebody has to pay. It ain't free, nor even cheap, never was, never will be. Just a question of who pays.
Does Amazon.com make a profit, a real profit yet? Or Yahoo? I don't think so, so who pays for what they do? Those who bought the stock.
Anyway, I find the new system beneficial to me -- if I watch my bids, and watch them frequently; but also, I really don't have to watch them any more closely than I did under the other, purely fixed bid procedure they used before. And this one is easier to manipulate than the old one, if you pay attention and act quickly (IMHO).
I have found the new system beneficial.
My experience could not be more different. I find the new system has been of no benefit to me while bid prices across the board (for my industries) have risen significantly under autobidding.
Add in MatchDriver, and I am autobidding on terms I have no interest in. As far as I'm concerned, Overture has taken two steps backwards.
What do you feel how many complaints these overture people are receiving because of auto bid and match driver? Would overture take back auto bid or match driver or they won't care?
But I suspect the people who are talking to customers are not the same ones who implemented these two programs.
The discussion there is pretty thorough (2 pages) and presents arguments for and against.
Will I be doing it wrong if I use it in terms of :below $0.50 - Auto
and above $0.50 - Fixed
There can't be hard and fast rules. Don't let the Auto/Fixed issue take your eye off the fact that using PPC is all about making a return on your advertising spend.
If you can comfortably hit your numbers, and make a good ROI by Auto bidding at 50 cents then do it. What I've found is that a lot of the advertisers that have used it thinking it's the panacea to all their woes have found themselves in no man's land, bidding higher than they would on fixed (because that's what they are encouraged to do), having some saboteuer jumping in and artificially forcing up their actual bid price.
We tend to categorise according to the level of service clients pay for, cometitiveness of keyword and other factors. So if the keyword price is around 30 cents but there are 4 or 5 companies playing the game unless you agressively manage the activity you can keep finding yourself in 4th or 5th place rather than the 2nd or 3rd that gives you your profitability, so we might chose to use Fixed for a keyword like that. On the flip side, there are others that may cost slightly more but are less competitive and the companies you are in competition with don't understand how things work, it's easy enough to out manoeuvere them using Autobidding, so you can set it up and put it to be for a little while.
It's one of the criticisms we have of software to auto bid, it doesn't take the X factor into account (stupidity).
