Is PPC Bid Management Software a Substitute for Expert Consultants?

PPC bid management software and applications are highly touted as an effective and inexpensive means to handle your own website marketing PPC campaigns. The developers make high claims for the software's ability to monitor, track and manage your pay per click bid management strategy – but can a software PPC bid management solution really take the place of the human touch?

A number of high-profile pay per click account management firms have done their own experimentation to determine how effective PPC bid management software is and come to an unsurprising conclusion – the software is pretty good, but a human touch makes it even better.

Bid management strategies are an important part of any pay per click advertising campaign. The best keywords for your business are often highly competitive, with many companies attempting to gain the highest price and score the top ad spots. If you bid too little, your ads may be left off the pages where your potential customers can find them – and you. If you bid too high, you'll win the coveted spot – but pay more for your ads than you have to. Deciding how much a keyword is worth to you calls for a human touch – but much of the actual bidding can be automated by software.

It's that human touch that makes a difference, though – not so much in the PPC bid management process as in the rest of the pieces that make your ad campaigns effective. On the other hand, bid management software automates the more tedious aspects of monitoring and tweaking a pay per click ad campaign, and does it quite well, once a PPC expert has set it up with the proper parameters. That's why most of the best PPC account management firms now use PPC bid management software – not as a substitute for expert PPC consulting but as a tool to free up the experts to focus on the creative side of the ad campaign. And let's face it – while computers may be very good at keeping track of bids and following directions, most of them aren't creative geniuses.

Most PPC account management companies today use a combination of PPC bid management software and human oversight to manage their customers' PPC accounts because it provides the best results and highest return on investment.

So what does this mean for the little guy – the business owner trying to decide who should be managing his pay per click accounts? First, PPC bid management software makes doing your own pay per click account management a little less time-consuming – but the programs won't improve all the other factors that play into a successful PPC campaign.

If you're looking to hire a company to do your PPC account management, try asking what software they use for PPC bid management. If they take pride in boasting that they do all of the bid management manually, you may want to choose a company that's more flexible and accepting of new technology and tools. If they wax poetic about the wonders of their bid management software and completely automate the process, you might want to find a PPC agency that's more creative. If, on the other hand, they tell you that they combine PPC bid management software with manual oversight, there's a good chance you've found the just-right PPC consulting firm.