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Ozometer by Play
The campaign was created to celebrate Foster's famous ‘No Worries’ attitude. In creating the campaign, Play searched for some of Britain’s most, and least, ‘No worries’ people, celebrities and places. More on Play's award winning campaign.Bid management strategies
by Doubleclick
Bid management in search relates specifically to PPC search. All PPC listings operate on a quality score basis with the best pages achieving the highest position in a search engine’s paid for area.
Once a campaign is up and running, the next major step is to calculate how to drive the most volume to the programme and to deliver efficiencies that will improve its ROI. The key to achieving this is putting in place effective bid management strategies.
How do you best manage the bids for the hundreds, thousands, or possibly millions of keywords in your programme? Will you manually change the bids of all your keywords or will you use an automated bid management tool that will perform all those ROI calculations for you? As far as time saving and efficiency goes, it is worth considering using an automated bid management tool provided by search engines (such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN) which can pull in the real search engine click and cost data as well as the conversion data and quality score. With this, data strategic decisions based on the true ROI are made far easier.
There are generally three bid management strategies or rules used by bid management tools:
Most bid management tools are only as powerful as the person defining the parameters the bid tools work within. Analysis of the current keyword performance before bid management will help you discover the profile of the keyword. You can then decide which bid strategy is the best fit for the keyword. Do your keywords need to maintain a position or do they better fit in a ROI-based bid strategy? Or is a combination of position and ROI a better fit?
Most bid tools will optimise ROI based on the portfolio approach. Grouping keywords into portfolios or groups as above is seen as the best way to optimise your ROI. However this is not always the case; measuring the ROI of the group as a whole can result in individual keywords not achieving their optimum performance. One solution is to have the capacity to switch off portfolio/group bidding.
The best bid management strategies are those that you can easily control. If you have an automated bid management system, look for an open system that gives you some input over the decisions that the tool makes, customise the thresholds which the tool will use to optimise the keywords, and can manually over-ride its logic, and easily modify bid strategies. Bid management - although it can be automated - is not a switch on and forget system. They use logic to calculate what the best position is and to bid for your keywords, but they can’t know what is happening out in the real world, so your input is needed (see 24-7 PPC management). You may also want to refine your bid management strategies further based on the conversion path to the final sale. Do the generic terms fuel the actual final sales on more exact keyword phrases? If so, should these generic terms receive a higher priority?
Orange use paid search across a broad range of campaigns to deliver against core objectives such as driving phone connections and raising brand awareness. Autobid keyword management is a key part of the paid search strategy that helps to lower CPA and ensure that awareness goals are achieved.
Dart Search bid management is the platform currently utilised across all Orange campaigns. The flexible functionality of the system allows different bid strategies to be set per campaign, based on varying objectives. For example, for campaigns where the core objective is to raise brand awareness, strategies are set in order to achieve 100% visibility. The benefits of using autobid strategies here is that the tool is able to identify if positions have dropped automatically and therefore make changes to bid price in order to meet goals instantaneously. Manual management of such a process would be inefficient and difficult to implement.
Other campaigns that focus on ROI are managed using more complex combinations of CPA and position based strategies. Here, using autobid management, Orange have seen a 40% reduction in CPC on some campaigns.
Bid management in search relates specifically to PPC search. All PPC listings operate on a quality score basis with the best pages achieving the highest position in a search engine’s paid for area.
Why bid management strategies are essential
Once a campaign is up and running, the next major step is to calculate how to drive the most volume to the programme and to deliver efficiencies that will improve its ROI. The key to achieving this is putting in place effective bid management strategies.
How do you best manage the bids for the hundreds, thousands, or possibly millions of keywords in your programme? Will you manually change the bids of all your keywords or will you use an automated bid management tool that will perform all those ROI calculations for you? As far as time saving and efficiency goes, it is worth considering using an automated bid management tool provided by search engines (such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN) which can pull in the real search engine click and cost data as well as the conversion data and quality score. With this, data strategic decisions based on the true ROI are made far easier.
Explanation of how techniques and tools work
There are generally three bid management strategies or rules used by bid management tools:
- Position: now operates on a quality score system whereby the position is determined on the quality of the site (Including volume of clickthrough) and the keywording of ads.
- ROI: there are two types of ROI targets, cost per acquisition (CPA) and revenue share. CPA is the total cost divided by the number of orders or actions expressed as a monetary value. Revenue share is the total cost against sales revenue expressed as a percentage
- Click target: where the aim is to deliver a defined number of clicks
Caveats
Most bid management tools are only as powerful as the person defining the parameters the bid tools work within. Analysis of the current keyword performance before bid management will help you discover the profile of the keyword. You can then decide which bid strategy is the best fit for the keyword. Do your keywords need to maintain a position or do they better fit in a ROI-based bid strategy? Or is a combination of position and ROI a better fit?
Most bid tools will optimise ROI based on the portfolio approach. Grouping keywords into portfolios or groups as above is seen as the best way to optimise your ROI. However this is not always the case; measuring the ROI of the group as a whole can result in individual keywords not achieving their optimum performance. One solution is to have the capacity to switch off portfolio/group bidding.
Implications for search marketing and advertisers
The best bid management strategies are those that you can easily control. If you have an automated bid management system, look for an open system that gives you some input over the decisions that the tool makes, customise the thresholds which the tool will use to optimise the keywords, and can manually over-ride its logic, and easily modify bid strategies. Bid management - although it can be automated - is not a switch on and forget system. They use logic to calculate what the best position is and to bid for your keywords, but they can’t know what is happening out in the real world, so your input is needed (see 24-7 PPC management). You may also want to refine your bid management strategies further based on the conversion path to the final sale. Do the generic terms fuel the actual final sales on more exact keyword phrases? If so, should these generic terms receive a higher priority?
Case study
Orange use paid search across a broad range of campaigns to deliver against core objectives such as driving phone connections and raising brand awareness. Autobid keyword management is a key part of the paid search strategy that helps to lower CPA and ensure that awareness goals are achieved.
Dart Search bid management is the platform currently utilised across all Orange campaigns. The flexible functionality of the system allows different bid strategies to be set per campaign, based on varying objectives. For example, for campaigns where the core objective is to raise brand awareness, strategies are set in order to achieve 100% visibility. The benefits of using autobid strategies here is that the tool is able to identify if positions have dropped automatically and therefore make changes to bid price in order to meet goals instantaneously. Manual management of such a process would be inefficient and difficult to implement.
Other campaigns that focus on ROI are managed using more complex combinations of CPA and position based strategies. Here, using autobid management, Orange have seen a 40% reduction in CPC on some campaigns.
