Paid Search

Paid Search Management Methods

At Commerce360, we take a technology-driven approach to managing your paid search campaigns.

We believe that the size and complexity of today’s paid search campaigns, especially in a time when the search engines are actively optimizing their algorithms to drive their own profitability, requires that you have powerful software helping to maximize your profits and minimize your spend.

Our ClickEquations search automation software provides us exactly this kind of tool. But this isn’t the way most firms or search marketers would manage your campaigns.

There are three common methods to managing paid search campaigns today:

• Set-And-Forget: An astounding number of paid search campaigns are set up in some type of ‘best guess’ configuration and then left running with little or no active management.
• Best Practices: Outsourced search management as well as corporate paid search managers typically rely on their own experience plus the ‘prevailing wisdom’ as conveyed at conferences, on weblogs, and in the search community. They apply diligent best efforts to manually follow and tune as many parameters as possible, with an inevitable focus on those that appear to be the most important or significant.
• Bid Management: Software tools are just beginning to impact paid search, and the first generation focuses on optimizing a single variable - the bid - in hopes of producing an overall impact.

At Commerce360 we’ve been down all of these paths. And we learned that neither faith nor diligence nor partial solutions work.

• Campaigns that aren’t actively managed inevitably waste huge portions of their budget and almost always miss big chuncks of potential traffic and revenue.
• Working hard is a great way to start, but humans just can’t stay on top of the millions or billions of campaign combinations, especially when the user behaviour, system rules, and competitive environment changes day-by-day or minute-by-minute.
• Managing bids is an attempt to wag the dog by it’s tail. The ‘right’ bid depends upon the keywords, ad-group organization, search query, text-ad, and landing page combination. Optimizing bids without first (and better yet simultaneously) testing every reasonable combination of all of these options is like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic - you may get a better view but the ship is still going down.

Our years of experience and empirical testing have proven that the only way to maximize paid search results is to actively measure and manage the process from end-to-end, starting with the goals and constraints of the company and then using software automation to oversee continual testing within each variable in the campaign. Each component - keywords, bids, text-ads, etc - must be rigorously tested not only in terms of its own performance but more importantly in terms of its impact on overall system performance.

A keyword with a lot of clicks may lose a lot of money. A text-ad which drives less traffic may drive more revenue. A landing page may work well for keywords which emphasize price but perform poorly when linked to keywords which emphasis quality. There are endless examples but the pattern is clear: you can’t tune a system by independently working on some or even all of its parts. Google’s bank account is full of money from those who have tried.

We’ve also learned that both the scale and complexity of this problem makes it one that for the most part people can’t solve. A person can’t review 50,000 keywords and eyeball the statistical significance of changes based on a dozen fluid variables. The search engines operate the campaigns, manipulate the appearance of your ads, and decide how much they’re going to charge you based on sophisticated proprietary software systems. As an advertiser you need equally sophisticated technology to manage your interests - who wants to play 12-level chess against a computer?

That’s why we built ClickEquations. It enables us to manage and constantly test and optimize all the components of a highly successful paid seach campaign.

Learn More
Find our more about how we use ClickEquations to optimize your PPC campaigns, or our overall approach to paid search campaign management.