Bidding for the Top: A Confession

I came across a post on seroundtable today that got me thinking. Apparently a WebmasterWorld thread was discussing whether PPC bidding wars are still as common as they once were. Over the past year and a half (particularly) Google has made it harder to rank first based on bid alone, introducing a variety of quality score concerns as determining factors for position ranking. The article I came across today polled readers to find out how often—if at all—they still participated in PPC bid wars.

I’ll be very interested in those results.

But either way, the issue sent me on one of those internal debates us PPC-ers love to participate in. I’ve always argued against bid war management styles, mainly because I believe too often PPC marketers shoot themselves in the foot with such tactics. When two people wake up everyday (or bid every few hours) with the sole purpose of outranking a competitor, they are raising the expectation of spend for everyone else.

Those two advertisers are letting Google know that word is worth more, and alas, overtime, our minimum bids increase across the board. It’s like getting  a bunch of advertisers in a room and having everyone start smacking each other. It really is quite silly.

So here I was today, reading that article up on my high horse when it dawned on me—how is that different from branding budgets? I have definitely participated in branding buys before for both companies and clients. (For those who are new to the PPC chaos—branding budgets are when a client or boss tells you that you have “X” amount of money, and rather than focus on a set conversion return, your primary goal is to gain share of voice a.k.a. be on the top…all the time.) For the record, I think most people would agree that branding budgets are a lot less common than they used to be.

These days we have so many different tiers of conversions and levels of success to use when quantifying a campaign’s performance, it seems a bit reckless to ever just spend to rank. But it stills exist–position bidding not just as a setting but as an overarching approach still exists, and oftentimes with great success.

With all of that said, I have to admit for a girl that has always preached against bidding wars, I have always been a fan of branding budgets. Alas, I guess that is why they say “the devil is in the details.” I definitely look forward to hearing the results from the poll mentioned above. What about you guys? Any of you still participating in bidding wars? What about branding budgets?

Bid Velocity: Knowing When to Slow Down

I am a huge fan of aggressive things. Seriously. I like watching car chases, enjoy loud music, and dig all adrenaline-oriented activities. I think part of the reason I’ve been successful in the past is that I’m a “Go Big or Go Home” type of lady. You can blame my two older brothers for that one.

When it comes to managing PPC accounts this approach can come in handy. Clearly the “make it happen now” approach is great when gathering information, engulfing yourself in a vertical, setting up tests, collecting data, and building out new landing pages. The more you can get up and testing, the better you will be in the long run—for the most part.

But what about bid velocity? Is an aggressive approach always best? That’s been something I’ve struggled with for quite some time, finely settling on a simple “no, it’s not.” The truth of it is there are times you should absolutely decrease your bid velocity and focus your PPC management efforts elsewhere. This has little to do with your resources, or outside time line factors and everything to do with the life cycle of your keywords.

So what are some examples of times you should decrease your bid velocity?

Test Campaign Launches: No matter how long you have been doing PPC, anytime you introduce a new campaign, make sure you keep the bid changing to a minimal for at least a full week, if not longer. To collect quality data you need to see how those keywords are received through-out each day, and on weekends…independent of any bidding variables you may want to introduce.

Promotional Campaigns: This may seem counter intuitive, since promotional campaigns tend to run for shorter period of times. You would think success would be found in changing bids often and capitalizing, but ultimately your pre-launch testing and data should take all of that guesswork off the table. The promotional campaign should be kept as stable as possible, so at the end you can say it was the promotion (and not your bidding strategy) that decided its level of success or failure.

When Automating: If you are applying any sort of AI principles to your campaigns, try to keep them as macro as you can. Leave the constant bid tweaking to the humans. Yeah I know that just got a few of you all riled up, but hey that is what the comment section is for. Go have at it…

Smaller Budget Campaigns: For those advertisers out there spending a few thousand a month or less, keep in mind you face a whole separate bag of issues. One of them being your budget restraints already limit your data return sets, so decreasing bid velocity can increase the value of that data when you are looking to extract overarching truths to move forward with.

Okay those are just a few things to get you all started with. I’m not saying to freeze your bidding finger entirely, or that there aren’t exceptions to the above examples. However, too often new advertisers think once they get some data they should start applying it, mixing things up, and get the ball really moving. As fun as that can be, you can also shoot yourself in the foot, by inevitably countering your initial successes with too many bid changes.

When it comes to bid velocity and best practices there are always a ton of opinions on the subject… so PPC-ers, let’s hear them. This blog is officially open for all debates {metaphorical gavel slams on desk}.