bidding automation

Thoughts On Intraday PPC Bid Management

How often do you update your PPC bids on Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and your 2nd tier search engines? Monthly, weekly, or daily? How about intraday? Today’s post covers some of my high level thoughts on intraday PPC bid management. If you’re already bidding intraday or if you’re thinking about it, I hope this post helps provide a framework and some points to think through in crafting your advanced bid strategy.

Why Consider Intraday Bidding?

Intraday Bidding

Before you even start biding intraday, I recommend determining precisely why you want to bid intraday. Of course it’s super cool to say your bids are getting updated all day, every single day. However, above and beyond the coolness factor, what is your true driving force behind your intraday strategy? I can think of a few great reasons why you would want to bid intraday:

You sell a product that has diminishing supply over time. If you have no more widgets to sell, you definitely want to lower your bids (or even turn off certain keywords).
Your business experiences very strong intraday seasonality. A good example is a business that does a ton of sales via phone. If your call center is not running 24/7, you will most likely want to adjust bids down when your call center is closed.
You’re in a super competitive market and drive a massive volume of clicks. You have so much data that the predicted value of each keyword actually changes during the course of the day.

Intraday Bidding On A Keyword Level Requires Lots of Data

There are two really popular intraday bidding models. The first involves blanket level bid adjustments across all keywords. We’ll get into some of those tactics later. The second involves getting super granular and making keyword-by-keyword bid adjustments on an intraday level. This tactic makes a lot of sense when you do a huge volume and it involves an enormous amount of data. Why? Bidding decisions need to be based on statistically significant data. If you make bid adjustments based on limited, non-statistical data, you’re setting yourself up for poor bidding decisions. If you’re making intraday bid adjustments on a keyword-by-keyword level, make sure you have tons of data.

Also, consider bucketing your keywords. Perhaps you only adjust bids intraday on your highest volume keywords, while the other keywords fall into your daily or even weekly buckets. As a bonus tip: Consider layering both strategies mentioned here. Make keyword level adjustments where you have tons of data and layer on account level strategies to all keywords.

Consider Advanced Dayparting For A Higher Level Approach

Let’s say you have account-wide intraday trends that you want to capitalize on. Perhaps your conversion rates tank when your call center is closed? I highly recommend taking advantage of advanced dayparting as a simple strategy to adjust bids up (as a function of the base) depending on time of day. The important caveat here is to make sure the data you’re looking at is the same time zone as your search engine account. Another tip: Make sure the conversion data you’re looking at is not lagged. You want to tie the conversions back to when they started for this exercise.

Take Latency In Search Engine APIs Into Account

Intraday strategies can become quite complex. Let’s say you’re looking at keyword level data and are trying to forecast keyword level conversion rates or even keyword level margin. Such calculations require click and cost data from the search engines. However, APIs can be delayed. If you’re making intraday decisions, make sure you are looking at the right click and cost data. Build safety checks into your algorithm in case the data becomes delayed.

Integrate SEM Bidding Into Your Back Office Systems

If you’re selling products that sell out, you can take your intraday bid management to the next level by looping it into your back office inventory systems. Just imagine: Inventory is getting low and you communicate this information to your bidding platform. Then, you bid down accordingly (or even pause certain keywords). You definitely do not want to pay for traffic to a product that you cannot sell. This framework works for both physical products and also digital products (such as leads). For example: You sell leads and your clients have daily caps in place.

SEM Automation Platforms and Intraday Bidding

As a closing thought, the right SEM automation platform can make a tremendous impact on your intraday bidding strategy. If you’re serious about intraday bidding and it’s a critical part of your overall strategy, make sure to ask the search platforms all about it. InsideVault, for example, takes intraday bidding quite seriously and can educate you all about the topic and how their platform optimizes intraday bids. I’m the biggest fan of SEM automation around and it becomes super important when you get to this fine level of optimization.

Image of bid button © iStockPhoto – head-off

Cyber Monday and Seasonal Bidding Strategies

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Nov 28 8

Cyber Monday is upon us! If you’re in the retail side of online marketing, you’ve been preparing for this day for the last few months. It’s not only one of the largest volume days (in terms of raw conversions) but it’s also one of the highest conversion rate days. Most businesses follow some sort of seasonal cycle. If you’re in retail, seasonably high conversions and conversion rates are upon us right now. If you’re in finance, high conversions and conversion rates are just around the corner and will take off in January. Today, I want to walk through a few PPC bidding tips to capitalize on seasonal trends.

Tip 1: Identify Seasonal Trends

Cyber Monday Gifts

PPC campaigns (and businesses in general) follow very similar trends each year. If you’ve been in business for a while, it’s critical to analyze data from past years. Pay special attention to seasonal peaks and lows. I’m talking about those months where conversion rate is high and those where it is low. Once you have identified these periods, you are armed with the information you need to make strategic bid changes, I’m talking about blanket bid increases and bid decreases to all keywords in your AdWords and adCenter accounts.

Why does this matter? It all comes down to profitability. Your margins in paid search are directly tied to conversion rates. The higher your conversion rate, the higher your percentage margin. The lower your conversion rate, the lower your percentage margin. This brings up into tip 2…

Tip 2: Bid Based On Seasonal Conversion Rates

If you’re headed into a seasonal period where conversion rates will be high (and you can afford to handle extra sales volume), I highly recommend bidding up. By doing so, you can reinvest some of your higher percentage margin into more sales volume which should ultimately drive more dollar margin. (Conversely, you may wish to lower bids and reduce costs during low conversion rate months.) Click through rate rises exponentially by position while the bid landscape is typically linear. You will capture a lot more volume by bidding up, so why not go for it during your best seasonal months?

Tip 3: Leverage Automated Platforms For Seasonal Bidding

If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you know I’m a huge fan of online marketing platforms such as Kenshoo, Acquisio, and Marin Software. I even wrote an SEM Automation Buyer’s Guide Whitepaper.

On a keyword level, I always recommend bidding based on conversion rate. Most SEM platforms offer this ability. They will forecast conversion rate on a keyword level and allow you to bid accordingly. However, today’s tip takes things to the next level. When it comes to seasonality, you’re not only bidding accurately on a keyword level based on conversion rate, but you’re now making blanket account level boosts when it makes sense.

My advice: Understand how much conversion rates will go up (or down). Then, boost all bids when the seasonal period starts. As time goes on, once you’re a few weeks into the seasonal period, start lowering your boost gradually since keyword level conversion rates (the projections from your automated system upon which keyword level bids are set) will start catching up. If you don’t lower your your overall boost, the seasonal increase will be double counted. You may not want to lower your boost all the way, but just remember that keyword level conversion rate projections will catch up and you’ll need to bring back your blanket boost increase at least a little.

Remember to do the exact same on the way down. If you know a low conversion rate period is coming up, make a blanket boost decrease. Then, after keyword level bids start catching up a few weeks in, make sure to gradually remove (or at least reduce) the negative boost.

I truly hope these seasonal bidding strategies help out. I know I’ll be looking for great deals tomorrow. If you’re in retail, best of luck with your Cyber Monday PPC campaigns!

PPC Bidding Automation Tips

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Sep 21 0

If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, I bet you know that I’m a huge proponent of SEM automation. I even wrote a whitepaper a while back, PPC Ian’s SEM Automation Buyer’s Guide. One of my favorite aspects of PPC platforms such as Kenshoo, Acquisio, and Marin Software is automated bidding. In that spirit, I wanted to provide a few invaluable tips to keep in mind when setting up and maintaining your automated bidding platform.

Tip 1: Verify Your Platform’s Data Daily

What You Need To Know

Good data means good decisions. Bad data means bad bidding decisions. I’ve seen it hundreds of times: Something goes wrong and your SEM platform does not sync data properly. Perhaps the search engine API is down. Perhaps your own API (or FTP) is not working and the platform cannot access your internal conversion data. Perhaps your internal system does not update conversions properly. Sometimes it’s just a day’s worth of bad data. Sometimes, the bad data can pour in for multiple days (my worst nightmare, that is if it goes undetected).

Here’s the problem: Automated bidding systems rely on accurate data. If the clicks, cost, conversions, or other important metrics are off, the bidding system is going to make mistakes. These mistakes can be incredibly costly. It’s important to audit your data daily on all levels: Account, campaign, adgroup, and keyword. It’s also important to make sure your internal conversion data is passed into the system correctly (if applicable). When you do catch issues, make sure to work closely with your account management team and, until the problem is fixed, make sure the bidding system ignores the bad data dates.

Tip 2: Leverage Internal Conversion Data

Do you currently bid based on conversion collected via search engine pixels? Or, do you leverage your own, internal conversion data? From my experience, search engine pixels are always off. They will never offer as accurate of a picture as your own internal data. As such, I highly recommend passing your internal conversion data into your automated bidding platform, if at all possible. By doing so, you will see an instant lift in your results (good data equals good results). If not easily possible, search engine pixel data can be a stepping stone until you’re able to integrate internal conversion data.

Tip 3: Invest Heavily In Your Bidding Setup

Long term, automated bidding systems save a ton of time while also driving improved results (more conversions at lower CPA). Short run, however, they require a ton of setup. In my experience, it’s the setup (or lack thereof) that will make or break your bidding system. My advice is to spend a good amount of time upfront thinking through all the details. I’m talking about these types of questions:

Should I pass data across search engines? For example, if Microsoft adCenter does not have statistically significant data on a keyword, should I leverage my Google data?
Should I minimize bid movement on a day-to-day basis? Let’s say my current bid is at $0.50 and I’m headed toward $1.00. Should the system make the entire move in one day or should the system make the move gradually?
What should my bidding system consider statistically significant? Is 100 clicks worth of data statistically significant? How about 1,000 clicks worth of data?

My advice is to compile a list of at least 30-50 such questions and then think through them in great detail. Engage your account management team and expect to dedicate a full time employee (for at least one month’s time) to make your new automated bidding system work.

So, there you have it. Some of my favorite automated bidding tips, especially if you’re newer to the exciting world of PPC bidding automation. I sincerely hope this helps and encourage you to investigate the great SEM platforms out there.