After you get to a certain point in Adwords, you start to get a LOT of keywords, campaigns, websites, and ad groups, and you start wondering what you are actually doing with your life. I mean, hey, I want to just advertise, and make some money, not spend hours pouring over the Google interface, managing campaigns!

Google makes advertisers work extra hard. Is it worth it? Well yes, for people that go the extra mile and outsmart their competition. Our company does this for a lot of corporate clients. There comes a time though when you have so many tens of thousands of keywords going that it is time to look at leveraging some technology to try to improve efficiency and lower the workload...

To manually review the bids and adjust them for 10,000 keywords takes a while even when using the Google interface to its utmost power. When you have been doing this for a while, you come up with your own ninja adwords techniques that you end up repeating quite a bit, which succeed in many different industries. Well why not turn this over to some intelligent software? Sure, why not?

I went on an all out search to see what could do this to help me and my company and this is what I learned:

1) Most of the big SEM companies that service the fortune 500 companies have their own proprietary systems

2) They are so expensive that they don't even list any prices on their websites.

3) Of the real bid managers out there that have decent reviews and capabilities, there are three that stand out, which include bidrank, atlas one point (formerly Go Toast), and Make me Top.

With bidrank and make me top, you can do a decent amount for about 200 bucks a month, but still I fell far short in being able to do a real good job with the 10,000 keywords I wanted to test. Atlas one point is so expensive to actually USE, that 150 keywords maxed out my little 90 dollar account within the first few days. How much would it cost to manage tens of thousands of keywords, just in adwords? I estimate at least 1600 bucks a month for 10,000 keywords, and it could easily be more.

I did find one other bid nanager from england, but I lost the link, so if someone knows of some good bid managers please comment and I'll include it below this post for everyone else to take advantage of.

My conclusion- I have to hire some programming teams to program my own industrial strength bid manager, capable of handling at least yahoo and google worldwide, with unlimited bid adjustments according to my exact ninja rules and the ability to create new ones, plus an integration with a webstats module so that you can do stuff like keep your cost per sale or cost per lead at a certain range and make your bidding adjustments based on your actual results.

Which language? Come on, stay away from Bill Gates baby. Php/mysql all the way. I have my own list of features in my head, but I am opening up a survey to find out what individual users and SEM companies are really looking for in a bid manager, so I can build a really good piece of ppc bid management software.

In the comments below, tell me about your ideal adwords bid management software and what it should do.

Comments, Comments, anyone?

-Steve

Steve Blom
Certified Google Adwords Professional

Adwords Training Video Author:

Blog:
http://marketingnewsblog.adwordstraining.org

Free Adwords video:
http://www.adwordstraining.org/video/free_adwords_tutorial_video.htm

Contact: steve@adwordstraining.org