I'm curious as to why I would use bid management software - I'd welcome your thoughts on the benefits of this type of system. I'm running in the financial arena where bids are anywhere from $3 to $20 and still managing to convert leads profitably. My campaigns run relatively smoothly, I check in and tinker with them about once a month. So what am I missing? Is there an advantage I could have here?
I think overture is the primary reason why. Unless overture policies have changed...if you have 3 bidders on a keyword guy1 bids $5.00 guy2 bids $4.99 guy3 bids $0.10 The actual cost per click is something like this: guy1: $5.00 guy2: $0.11 guy3: $0.10 The person who bids the highest kinda gets screwed. So, you use an auto bid updater to find the highest actual bid that is being used on oveture and lowers yours, so you aren't paying extra for each click or can choose to be #2 and save a ton of cash. I believe adsense has a smarter pricing system, so bid checking isn't as important there, but I could be wrong. I keep meaning to manage my PPC better, but its a PITA.
Yeah, definitely. Alot of times people like to "Bully" other bidders into bidding a lot more than they would like to bid. For example, if someone noticed that guy2 was actually bidding $4.99 for the keyword, while guy3 was only bidding $.10. He'd come in and bid $4.98, forcing guy2 to pay the $4.99 per click, and in turn only making himself pay 1 cent more than the previous guy3, which would now be only $.12. So, what would happen is guy2 would probably stop bidding on the keyword because he now might be losing money... Then you'd become the new guy2 Pretyt sneaky, but a lot of people do it. Brad