I'm looking to test out Overture's new bid management tool called the Search Optimizer. On Overture, the caption reads "Keyword Bidding Is Easy With Search Optimizer." My question is have any of you ever tried this and is it as "easy" as they say it is? I've already worked with Keyword MAX's BidDirector tool, which I found was satisfactory and which I would recommend, but am looking to test alternatives.

Hi Generator,

We tried to deploy the Marketing console with Search Optimizer over the past two months. We spent a great deal of time and effort properly tagging our website properties, setting up the marketing console and the search optimizer reports. We spent even more time properly formatting all keywords in our numerous campaigns to use the new MC tagging codes. Unfortunately, what we got were mixed results and a seemingly endless list of ways to fix inaccuracies. The tech support dept knew less about the product than we did so they were of little help. Tech support understood pricing structure and basic set up processes, but had no idea how the application worked much less a proven strategy for deployment. Our analysis is this; we created and use a very simple online reporting system that tracks and reports on all of our marketing campaigns. It took us very little time to set this reporting system up which gives us 90% of the information Overture's MC can give us. So you will have to answer the question; is it worth all the time, effort and cost to POSSIBLY get 10% more information?

In fairness that extra 10% of knowledge may be worth it if you sell thousands of different widgets and have thousands of PPC campaigns to sell these widgets. In this case, if you can get it working, Overture's MC and SO may pull together all your information into one coherent package. You should take note that Search Optimizer only works for Overture campaigns.

One item to seriously ponder. Marketing console relies on auto generated reports from Google to populate their reports. If Google decides to somehow throw a road block at this process they could render your MC reporting system virtually useless at any moment. That is a very precarious position to put yourself in.

If anyone out there has successfully implemented MC and SO I would love to hear how you did it.

Regards,

Lead Discovery

Hi Generator,

We tried to deploy the Marketing console with Search Optimizer over the past two months. We spent a great deal of time and effort properly tagging our website properties, setting up the marketing console and the search optimizer reports. We spent even more time properly formatting all keywords in our numerous campaigns to use the new MC tagging codes. Unfortunately, what we got were mixed results and a seemingly endless list of ways to fix inaccuracies. The tech support dept knew less about the product than we did so they were of little help. Tech support understood pricing structure and basic set up processes, but had no idea how the application worked much less a proven strategy for deployment. Our analysis is this; we created and use a very simple online reporting system that tracks and reports on all of our marketing campaigns. It took us very little time to set this reporting system up which gives us 90% of the information Overture's MC can give us. So you will have to answer the question; is it worth all the time, effort and cost to POSSIBLY get 10% more information?

In fairness that extra 10% of knowledge may be worth it if you sell thousands of different widgets and have thousands of PPC campaigns to sell these widgets. In this case, if you can get it working, Overture's MC and SO may pull together all your information into one coherent package. You should take note that Search Optimizer only works for Overture campaigns.

One item to seriously ponder. Marketing console relies on auto generated reports from Google to populate their reports. If Google decides to somehow throw a road block at this process they could render your MC reporting system virtually useless at any moment. That is a very precarious position to put yourself in.

If anyone out there has successfully implemented MC and SO I would love to hear how you did it.

Regards,

Lead Discovery
Interesting point of view... how well did the bid management tool work though?

The bid management worked as expected, however setting up campaigns to hit a target price point was an exercise in futility and frustration. The main reason is lag time. You set your parameters and let it go, but you don't get actual spend results for 24 hours or more. With the volume of traffic we deal in, this could mean huge expenditures before understanding if your changes were effective. Or worse your price point was not in alignment with the marketplace so no leads are generated to supply your clients with. And again this tool only works with overtures listings, which makes sense but if you are like us Google makes up a significant portion of your ad spend, not being able to include them in this system is a serious drawback.

As we all know at the end of the day we need to tie actual sales data to the marketing campaign data to have a complete ROI report. If you sell widgets and your sale is finalized online, then this can be accomplished using MC/SO. If you are a lead generator where a sale is made after the fact then you have to figure out a way to integrate this data outside of the system. Overture's solution is basically to download their report data and merge it with your sales data in XL. In my view this is going back to what most people started out doing at the inception of PPC.

I think that MC and SO are at a beta stage and are not ready for prime time, once they are ready for prime time I wouldn't doubt that they will replace the current campaign management system. Perhaps at that time it will be a valuable tool.

Overture could take this product a long way if they conducted some serious usability studies.

Cheers