Practical bid management systems
15th July 2009 Posted in Search
Sonar is the in-house IT system that supports all of our activities - bid management, campaign analysis and reporting, CRM - you name it. Having our own bid management sytem is fundamental to our offering. Firstly it gives us complete flexibility to apply any type of rules to govern bid changes. We’re not believers in ‘black box’ algorithms - it is vital that a campaign manager understands exactly why a specific bid change is being applied, and can directly control these changes.
I’ll give you an example. We may choose to apply a rule to a campaign that will automatically increase bids to the ‘recommended first page bid’ (experienced managers will know that ‘recommended’ is a Googleism for ‘required’ - if you choose not to follow the ‘recommendation’, your ads will probably never show on any page). However, to blindly apply a rule such as this would carry significant risk. Recommended first page bids can change dramatically from day to day, and variations of 100% or more are not unusual. Blindly applying such changes could result in huge changes to overall spend and other factors such as ad position and CTR.
Sonar allows the manager to set a notification threshold. If the change exceeds this limit, the campaign manager receives a message with the details so they can review and reject it if they wish. There are many other examples where Sonar helps us to integrate our processes and systems, but we wouldn’t want to give away all our competitive advantages…
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