We're looking for opinions on the best software program or service that will provide one-stop editing for Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing, and will adjust bid amounts based on analytics. We've checked out 2 programs that we like so far: acquisio.com clicksweeper.com Are there better programs out there, or similar programs that are less expensive? Click Sweeper is $50/mo per ppc account. We're using it on a couple of accounts right now to test it out, but I would much rather get a software based solution that I can own outright. We spoke with a rep from Acquisio and if I remember correctly, their service was 1.5% of the ad spend, which would also be extremely expensive. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
I'd never use software that automatically alters my bids etc. Do it all manually is my advice. I've set my account up in such a way that whereas in the beginning, campaigns/adgroups had to be checked every 2-3 days, some of them now can be checked every week or 2, without any adverse effect. New campaigns/adgroups will need monitoring closely in the early days but as time goes on, the duration between checks can be further apart.
I don't think we'll ever be able to get away from doing a lot of bid changing manually. We've been doing it all manually until now, but just in the last week that we've been using clicksweeper it's given us some fairly impressive results. We're using it to optimize the bids to get the highest rate of return and it's actually working really well. You can have it optimize bids to get the highest conversion rate, or the highest click through rate as well. I was pretty skeptical of the program (or any other PPC management program for that matter) to begin with, but right now I'm a believer. It seems to be working really well. We're still big believers in having the human touch in PPC, so we'll still be doing a lot of changes manually, but the one thing that is good about this system is that it goes through and tests different bid amounts to determine what's going to give the highest rate of return, and that's something that would be much harder to do without software like this. There are 2 clients that we're using clicksweeper on right now, but think we're going to implement it on another 15 or so this week, and maybe test a couple other services on some other client accounts. I'm sure there are products out there that are better though. With Aquisio, thanks for the reminder on the cost. I forgot about the $1000/mo part. Not that big a deal if you have a few hundred thousand in PPC spend, but it's far too much for us right now.
This is not one I can vouch for personally, but I know a few people who use ppcbidmax and are happy with it.
I used BidRank.com and another service a long time ago, but they seemed to be completely worthless. In fact, at that time (BidRank could be much better now - that was 3 years ago) I thought both of the programs I used had negative effects on my campaigns. You could set them up to keep you in a certain position, but I thought that was scary because bid amounts were really volatile at the time. Thanks for the heads up on Atlas Solutions. I'll check it out. Has anyone used KeywordMax.com before?