Its easy to be lured into thinking all you have to do is set up some automated bid management toolset for your paid search campaign (PPC) and sit back and watch the money come in. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case. Nonetheless, with a little planning, you can use these various ppc tools to your advantage, freeing up your time to do more important, less routine things than managing bidding.

Case in point, I have been using www.keywordmax.com lately and I do love the new version they came out with a few weeks ago. You can now simultaneously manage multiple instances of the same keyword/match type across multiple campaigns! Before this release, what happened is that the first instance of the keyword that keyword max found was managed, the others being ignored. Not a very good situation if you are running 25 identical versions of the same keyword but differing in geotargeting (e.g. “keyword A” in kansas, “keyword A” in nebraska, etc…).

I have also found that having a good methodology and system for selecting what keywords to manage really helps as well. I have been using database technology and simple formulas based upon conversion rates, minimum impressions and overall competitiveness of the keyword to come up with my selection of keywords to manage using keyword max. I then run the query and save the results as a table, labeling as this month’s keyword max selections.

Give keywordmax a try and let me know what you find out! Its alot of work but will pay off with lower conversion costs and more effective spending of your advertising dollars!

Google came out around a month ago with another new PPC tool for their adwords advertisers - called “Optimize Campaign” (see snapshot below).

I guess we can’t expect Google to programatically replace us search engine marketers just yet. I tried out the campaign optimizer on a few client campaigns and found out the following:

• It seemed to suggest raising the bids quite a bit of the time (imagine that!)
• The suggestions for optimizing the text ads were really weak - all I ever saw was a revising of the display url to show the ‘www’ subdomain (which i dont want to do anyway)
• The google optimizer did however have some good ideas for new keywords

Frankly, on first glance, a search engine marketer may have been worried, thinking that Google was going to eliminate our business by building an automated tool to do our PPC work. However, on first glance, it looks like it will be a while before you can replace your human search engine marketing analyst!

What are your thoughts on the new tool?