SEARCH MARKETING TIPS

The Right To Bid

Effective bid management is the key to success with pay-per-click advertising. However, managing keyword bids across multiple search engines can be a time-consuming and complicated process that requires significant investments in training and selecting the right personnel.

As the budgets and sizes of these campaigns increase, marketers require additional support to manage them well. Big adopters of search marketing (who also tend to be tech-savvy) are more likely to outsource their campaigns to search agencies, thus strengthening their ability to track and monitor campaigns. But whatever solution marketers choose, be it manual (through search engine tools or spreadsheet solutions), tool-based (through search providers like Efficient Frontier or Atlas, or Web analytics providers like Omniture) or outsourcing to search marketing agencies, they should consider the degree of complexity of their campaign and the support they require. To keep overheads to a minimum, most marketers in Hong Kong use free tools provided by search engines to manage their bids. Utilising bid tools can make managing search marketing campaigns easier and more profitable, whilst saving time and valuable advertising dollars.

Besides incorporating historical data and organisational keyword features that allow for clearer evaluation of keyword performance across providers, automated tools for bid management also optimises a marketer's budget for effectiveness by allowing him to tie in cost to each keyword/category and re-allocate the budget to categories that improve ROI. In addition, automated tools for bid management also helps the marketer manage his campaign more efficiently by giving him control over the search campaign simply by using the keyword discovery tool.


Source: Bidding Technology: Selecting the Right Tools for Evolving Search Campaign Needs (JupiterResearch, June 2006)

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