Marketing Matrix: Bid Managment Tools - The Industry Leading PPC Bid Management Tool

PPC Bid Management Tools are an integral part of the AdWords process. Having a rich relevant list of keywords in your campaign to bid on, and monitoring and adjusting those keyword bids, is essential for AdWords success.

While small advertisers may have an easy time managing their PPC keyword bids with a small list of keywords, as the businesses grows and develops their keyword list, it becomes increasingly difficult to track and manage PPC bids manually. Often, small and medium sized businesses lacking time and resources to constantly monitor their keyword bids fall victim to the "setting and forgetting" method, causing them to lose money.

Bid Management Tools: How to Manage PPC Bids

So how do you manage PPC bids? You don?t have time to constantly be monitoring every keyword in your various campaigns, and yet tracking and adjusting your PPC keyword bids is essential. Sure, you could hire a full-time PPC manager is one option, or you could outsource to a professional PPC bid management service, but these options can both get quite pricey.

WordStream?s PPC Advisor software comes with built-in PPC bid management tools, our Keyword Bid Optimizer, along with other PPC management tools to help you create, optimize and manage your PPC campaigns. WordStream's PPC Advisor is designed to save you time and money. The software?s 20 Minute Work Week alerts you to actions you can quickly take to optimize and save money, such as PPC bid adjustments.

You can optimize keyword bids quickly and easily with our automated PPC bid management tool. WordStream's automation bidding software takes care of the tedious aspects of PPC keyword bid management while making intelligent bid recommendation, but ultimately leaves the decisions up to you.

While our PPC bid management system has a powerful impact on lowering costs and improving return on investment, it's still useful to keep an eye on your account's maximum and minimum bids. We suggest some PPC bid management strategy advice below.

PPC Bid Management Tools: Understanding CPC Bid and Quality Score

What determines your ad position in AdWords is a formula Google uses:

Ad Rank = CPC bid � Quality Score

CPC bid refers to the maximum bid you designate that you're willing to pay for a given keyword.
Quality Score is the grade Google gives your ad, based on a "keyword's click-through rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword and ad to the search term, your account's historical performance, and other relevance factors".

Early in the process of learning AdWords, you may wonder about maximum and minimum bids. According to Google:

?A minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bid is assigned to each keyword in your account based on its quality (or Quality Score). The minimum bid is usually the lowest amount you can pay per click in order for your keyword to show ads."

So by raising your Quality Score, you can lower your minimum bid and CPC. High Quality Scores result in lower costs and better ad positioning.

Luckily, search engines like Google reward search marketers who group their keywords. When your ad groups are closely related, your ads are more relevant to the keywords you're focusing your PPC bids on, which in turn lowers your minimum first-page bid and CPC. Since you're getting more qualified clicks, you're making the search engines more money, and they reward you by increasing your Quality Score.

PPC Bid Management Strategy: Manual Bid Management

Optimizing your keyword bids manually requires trial, error, and time.

Advertisers can slowly increase or decrease their maximum CPC bids and carefully monitor the results: when ROI plateaus or decreases, then the bid has reached its optimal point for that day. Simultaneously, advertisers should be managing bids with the goal of improving Quality Score.

The problem is that it can often be difficult to identify keywords with potential. As an advertiser, you need to be willing to risk a certain amount on a promising keyword, but also knowing when to give up on a keyword that just isn't performing well. This is why trial, error, and time make up so much of the bid management process, and why manual bid management is so time intensive.

PPC Bid Management Tool Strategy: Quality Score and AdWords

The most effective form of PPC bid management isn't raising and lowering your maximum bid, but rather pushing down your minimum, or ?first page? bid, which you do by strategically and effectively grouping and organizing your keywords.

At WordStream, we understand the importance Quality Score and are dedicated to helping customers with PPC bid management, assisting them so that they bid on their most valuable keywords and get the best ad positioning for the least amount of spend.

WordStream?s PPC Advisor Software offers keyword grouping and organization tools to help raise your Quality Score, as well as keyword discovery tools, PPC bid management tools, and much more. Let us help you find those keywords with the greatest potential for your business.