Manual Bid Management

Running a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign can be time consuming and confusing for a beginner. An important part of the process is deciding how much to bid on certain keywords and adjusting those bids to maximise the performance of the campaign. It is tempting to use Google’s own automated bidding system or to use bid management software to make this easier. At Social Media, we don’t take the easy route; we take the most effective one.

By managing the bids manually, we keep complete control over the campaigns for our clients. Software can be useful for analysing performance data over time but they cannot take ‘real life’ factors into account and changes can be slow to come into effect. Technical hitches and incorrect data can also make an automated bid management system problematic. Seemingly small factors in the outside world can skew the data received by the performance management programme which then ends up affecting bids for months afterwards. Computer programmes are also notoriously bad at ‘thinking outside the box‘. Using any automated system has also the major drawback of not allowing the sort of human innovation and intuition that can make a big difference to any online marketing strategy.

With manual bid management there is scope for a PPC expert to raise and lower bids in reaction to how the ad groups or individual keywords are performing. They can also change things based on outside factors that could affect how an ad group or keyword performs. For example if a company is selling a product that is suddenly featured on a TV programme or in a prominent magazine then they would want to increase the bids relating to that product. This factor would never be taken into account with any sort of automated bid management system.