In our company, a completely manual approach alone was not sufficient for managing sophisticated SEM campaigns. With sophisticated I mean huge keyword sets, multiple search engines, multiple metrics etc.
My colleague Kristian and I discovered that an automated approach like SearchCenter (ie. Kenshoo, SearchIgnite and Efficient Frontier) on its own wasn’t enough to give us the satisfaction we needed unless it was combined with other products.
Imagine an online bank with low conversion rate (CR) relative to peers. The problem with Efficient Frontier’s data modeling approach is that it can tell you what keywords and ad groups are converting and not converting, but it can’t tell you WHY, which is the most important question in my opionion. For instance, if your CR only allows you to profitably bid to avg position 6.5, you’re going to get lousy volume unless you improve your conversion rate, and there’s nothing Efficient Frontier can do to help you other than giving you the possability to focus upon it.
Thats why an automated bid management system combined with Web Analytics and Multivariate testing is the way to go, because workflow efficiencies would allow you to get alot more done, conversion funnel data relative to search adgroups could easily be analyzed and acted on, testing could be conducted as a direct result of SEM campaign analysis.
Data modeling alone is not enough. There must be a conjoining of data modeling, scalably applied manual oversight and integration with central Web Analytics platforms for SEM. Conversion funnel analysis for SEM must be integrated for its applied output to be scalable across an organization. Multivariate testing must be integrated with both Web Analytics and any automated bid management system.
To sum up, the best results are achieveable by mixing an automated bid management system for SEM with manual management with “Web Analytics being the conscious eyes providing the de-duped, channel agnostic, paid and unpaid unified view of everything”.
What’s your take on this? If you are using any SEM automated bid management system like SearchCenter, Kenshoo, SearchIgnite, or Efficient Frontier please share your experience and satisfaction levels here.
