I must confess; I like to delegate tasks as much as the next person, and who doesn't. However, there are certain things you simply CANNOT entrust to others and bidding for keywords in my AdWords campaigns ranks quite high on my list of such things. While it is true that automatic bidding features can make PPC management easy for advertisers who are simply unable to find time to review performance of individual keywords and adjust bids accordingly, there is a certain downside that can have quite a negative impact on your budget and campaign performance.
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Why Is It A Bad Idea To Use Automatic Bidding In Your AdWords Campaigns?[/caption]Automated Features Aren't Intuitive Enough:
Let's face it, the best person to understand your business model and marketing priorities is - no marks for guessing here - YOU. While automatic bidding features in AdWords can make use of historic data to made decisions intelligently, it is too much to expect from the software to know which keywords are more essential to your core-business. That is also the case with Conversion Optimizer in AdWords. It may be able to increase your bids by making use of your historic conversion data but it cannot intelligently differentiate between more profitable keywords and less profitable ones.
Let's say you are running an eCommerce site selling apparel. One product is no different from the other for Conversion Optimizer but that is not the case in reality. There will be certain products that - though sell less - are more profitable as compared to other products that may have high volume sales but present less profitability. By making use of your conversion data, the Optimizer is going to bid more aggressively for high volume keywords which increases your advertising spend and offers lesser ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend). Granted you can make use of AdWords Scripts and create automated rules but then again, how many of average advertisers are likely to be proficient in creating those scripts, or even understand them. This is one of the main reasons advertisers end up going for PPC management services.
Losing Impressions For Important Keywords
Another problem that advertisers face with automatic bidding is losing out on Impression Share. There are no guarantees that your ad shows up every time a search is made just because you are bidding for it. As we all know, Ad rank determines which ads will be eligible to show against a certain query. Now, your quality score might be an important part of Ad Rank but you can side-step that by bidding more aggressively for keywords that are more profitable for your business and receive more impression share. That is difficult to achieve when you are using automatic bidding which often results in loss of impression share and ultimately, loss of potential conversions.
By making an argument for manual bidding, I am in no way suggesting that you should NEVER use automatic bidding. If you are running a large AdWords campaign and managing it by yourself and cannot find time to focus on individual keywords, automatic bidding might be useful for you. Even then, I would suggest that you hire an agency to run your campaign for you which will not only increase conversions for more profitable keywords but also reduce your advertising spend.
Guest Post By Shawn Austin
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