Overwhelmed by bid management? You're not alone. If you're running dozens, hundreds or thousands of keywords, it's hard to get the right position for the right price. You might even be tempted to test an endless number of variables. Don't do it! Try an approach that combines the power of scientific testing and the art of on-the-fly decision-making: Test, then sculpt.

Performing controlled experiments to test the results of campaign changes can provide valuable metrics, --

-- but it's unrealistic to think that you can test everything. There simply isn't enough time or money in the world to effectively test for each variable. That's where sculpting comes in.

What is sculpting? It’s the process of making ad-hoc tweaks and adjustments to your campaigns, especially your bids, based on known parameters and gut instinct. For example, if you know that, in general, you get a better return on advertising spend when your ad appears in position four rather than position one, you may want to scan your various campaigns, ad groups and keywords looking for those that are showing up in higher positions and adjust your bids downward. You may do this dozens or hundreds of times in a given session. You’re not conducting controlled tests on each one. You’re moving fast and making educated guesses about how to shave spending here or boost a position there.

But in order for sculpting to work, you must start with some baseline information about your program's actual effectiveness.

Knowing When to Test

By testing, I mean performing controlled experiments where you test one variable at a time. You may perform a controlled test to find out things like:

1. Which campaign draws the highest number of visitors?
2. What keyword position provides the optimal balance of cost and conversion?
3. Which landing page generates the highest conversion rate?

Think back to 8th grade science class. In a controlled experiment, you set out your hypothesis (I believe that landing page A will generate more conversions than landing page B), you test your hypothesis (by setting up an A/B testing scenario in your marketing software and waiting for enough data to arrive to give valid results) and then you report on your results. Bid management testing works similarly.

But it's worth pointing out that when it comes to true testing, the most tedious (and potentially costly) part comes when you're waiting for the data to be gathered. In the case of bid management, marketing dollars can be flying out the window for days or weeks before you've gathered enough data to make a final decision about a campaign.

Clearly, testing everything all the time is not an option. So how do you identify the times that controlled experiments are the most necessary? You'll want to invest the time and money into performing true testing when:

• You're advertising on a new search engine: Visitor behavior on different search engines can differ significantly. Test assumptions on each new search-engine network you engage with.


• You're expanding into a new network: If you've always been a straight search-network advertiser and now you're moving into content networks, or vice versa, you need to do a reality check of how well your current campaigns will fare in the new environment before adding other campaigns into the mix.


• You're launching a brand new campaign: One great way to blow through a PPC budget is to let a brand new campaign go untested. Closely watch any new campaigns and measure their effectiveness.


• You've radically increased your keyword footprint: If you've recently performed a whole new round of keyword discovery and have grown your campaign keyword list exponentially, it's worth your time to test in order to pinpoint winning keywords and weed out those that are underperforming.

Test, then Sculpt

After your campaigns are up and running and you've performed your initial testing, it's time to shift from creation mode into maintenance mode. And that's where campaign sculpting comes in. Sculpting is similar to testing in that changes are made to the campaign. But unlike a controlled experiment, sculpting involves:

• Identifying campaigns that are of interest: In Lyris HQ, this is as simple as looking for the extreme ends of the color spectrum on the Search Marketing report, or sorting campaigns by cost per conversion.


• Performing a reality check: By default, Lyris HQ includes a week of data in its reports. For campaigns of interest, expand the scope of the data to ensure that the information you're seeing is part of a larger trend and not an anomaly.


• Taking immediate action: Once you've identified campaigns that are trending in an undesirable direction, the sculpting process urges you to step in and take action. If you see a campaign with a high cost per conversion, for example, tweak your bid so that the ad appears in a lower position which results in a lower cost. You'll step in and make these on-the-fly tweaks for each campaign of interest.


• Noticing repeat offenders: In bid sculpting, the goal is to not see the same campaign twice. After all, you've made a change to your campaign in the hopes that it begins performing as well as your other campaigns. If you start to see a campaign or two that require your attention week after week, these campaigns should become candidates for controlled testing.

As mentioned before, bid sculpting is a maintenance task, and campaigns that are constantly underperforming need more than a tweak; they need an overhaul.

Addressing the Art and Science of Bid Management

In any bid-management situation, there's a place for both testing and sculpting. Perform tests on any new campaigns or campaign environments to put scientific metrics in place, then transition to a sculpting approach that lets you quickly optimize your ongoing campaigns. Bid management is part art (sculpting) and part science (testing). A bid-management approach that makes use of both testing and sculpting will save you time and money.

###

About the Author

Comments (1)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name

Email

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Add Comment