Bid Management Software

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is it?

A progression from Google Ads Editor might be something like Bid Management Software. This is a third-party tool used to help drive search efficiency by using different things like automated rules, artificial intelligence (AI), and different things like that. It can automate your bids and it can automate your budget depending on predetermine KPIs that you build into that tool.

So you’re building your objectives into the tool and then it uses its AI or it’s set up to drive the best results possible from Google Ads for your goal. It’s a simplified way of optimizing and very useful if you’re managing multiple clients in a big agency, or if you have big expectations of your search.

For smaller stuff, Bid Management Software would be overkill. You don’t need it for everything. It’s for just very much high-level, high-spend activity. And just some examples of Bid Management Software will be around the likes of DoubleClick, which is owned by Google. There’s Marin, there’s Adobe DART Search, which is kind of part of DoubleClick, Aquisio, AdCore and then other tools like Segmatic, which are able to drive Bid Management from your Google Ads. Again, it’s costly.

Advantages and disadvantages

So just outline some advantages and disadvantages of Bid Management Software.

Advantages

• Reduced time on reporting: You have to spend less time on reporting and optimization because the software does it for you.
• Reduced time on optimization: They tend to be quite visual so you get some nice graphs and it can be quite good for high-level reports to key stakeholders
• Enhanced bidding strategies: There are enhanced bidding strategies that may not be available in the standard PPC activity – for example, target CPA, position-based and so on.
• Whitelabel reporting and dashboards: We’re able to whitelabel them so things like you can add your company logo, your client logo, whatever it is to the report. So you’re branding it for clients and stakeholders.
• Automatic budget management: It can manage your budgets. We don’t really ever want to overspend our budget. We try to manage our budget within the framework of that budget itself. So it will do that first and alleviate risk around overspends. This helps us to keep spend within monthly thresholds. So it will do that first and alleviate risk around overspends
• Optimize audience, device, and location bid adjustments: It allows us to optimize to meet those predetermined KPIs.

Disadvantages

• Is expensive: It can be very expensive.
• Requires training: It requires training and, if you don’t implement it correctly, it can have disastrous results.
• Requires correct implementation: Correct implementation of the tool is vital. Otherwise, you will drive a poor performance from synchronous action meant to drive and improve performance.

Choosing a bid management tool

Here are some considerations around choosing a Bid Management tool:

• Cost: It is the biggest outlay of using the platform, so what is the cost using this tool?
• Ease of use: How easy is it to use?
• Management options: What are the bid and budget management options available to you? Because the reason you’re doing a Bid Management buy would be that you want to reduce time on budgeting or optimization at keyword level or reporting, whatever it is. What is the efficiency there?
• Other integrations: Are there integrations with Google Analytics? Are there integrations with email? Are there integrations with other platforms, Facebook, or Bing, or Twitter or what is it? So what can it integrate with?
• Attribution: What can be attributed to search? What can be attributed to social? What can be attributed to all of the different channels in a multi-channel marketing plan? So attribution is important too.
• AI possibilities: AI is essential to all of this stuff because as machine learning builds more and more we need to understand what are the AI possibilities of this. Is it built on an AI engine or is built on a lookback engine? Essentially what are the AI possibilities? Because futureproofing your activity will be around AI and then like everything.
• Reporting: The reporting an optimal optimization and customization is essential for the purchase in the first place. So is this part of the mix and how can we leverage that?