Automated bidding is not going anywhere – from the engines to bid management tools, everyone is trying to jump on this wagon before they are left behind and become obsolete.
Why is every marketer so hyped about it?
From a marketer’s perspective, using automated bidding would imply less control over your accounts. When every penny counts, it’s vital to know when we need to increase our bids to drive performance and where should we increase our visibility.
Based on this, is it a good idea to use automated bidding to do the heavy lifting?
The short answer is yes, for several reasons:
- Different bidding strategies are available – We can leverage the best one to deliver the best results; our day-to-day work will change from a never-ending cycle of reviewing performance and pushing or pulling accordingly, to a more strategic role.
- More knowledge = better results – No human will ever be able to account for all the possible combinations from all the possible intent signals targeted in each search; we should leave the machines to do what they do best.
- Machine learning – While we struggle to keep up with an ever changing landscape, automated bidding strategies have already learned and adapted to it.
This will free up time to be used in planning, strategising, implementing new features and improving accounts, which will ultimately lead to better performance.
What’s in it for search engines and bid management platforms?
There are a few reasons why:
- Everyone is doing it (and claim they do it better than everyone else) – If you don’t keep up and continue to improve the machine learning behind it you will become obsolete and get left behind.
- Better performance = happier clients – Self-explanatory…
For the engines and bid management platforms, automated bidding is a lot more than a nice-to-have feature, it’s a must-have! Everyone is pushing for it, and not only working on their machine learning or launching new strategies, but working on identifying more and more relevant intent signals to keep in front of the competition.
So what can we use automated bidding for?
Depending on your goals there are several strategies available that can be used:
Now that we know what strategies are available, below we can find their limitations:
There are several strategies available, and they can be implemented for a single campaign, or across a combination of campaigns (portfolio bid strategies). This means that for each account based on the goals and targets of a campaign, we should aim to use a combination of different strategies to increase performance.
Ok, but does it actually impact performance?
Yes it does, it can be a very valuable tool to increase performance for any account.
Below you can find some results, showing performance before and after a new bid strategy was implemented:
With several strategies available across engines and bid management systems, and with positive results, there is no excuse not to test it today. For more information on bid management strategies, contact us.
