Comments on: AdWords Bid Management: Advanced Tactics

By: Chris Crompton

Chris Crompton — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:47:52 +0000

@TomDemers – Great article by RKG; thanks for the link. Their method is much more complicated and requires specialized software (which they happen to sell ;) — but I’m sure the results are good.

@awhinston – I think clickable.com may have conversion value as an option for their bid management algorithms. But you can do this yourself by doing reports in AdWords that show value / cost for ad groups and managing bids accordingly.

By: awhinston

awhinston — Sat, 09 May 2009 02:28:15 +0000

Great post. Are there any recommended analytics/bid management tools that can calculate LTV at the keyword/adgroup level within a PPC campaign?

Certainly a lot of value can be gained by utilizing analytics to estimate LTV for the customer base as a whole (and even individual campaigns).

But breaking down LTV WITHIN your PPC campaign has the potential to unlock big efficiency gains. Thoughts?

By: TomDemers

TomDemers — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:07:56 +0000

Great post; there was another on this subject with a slightly different take over at RKG: http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2009/04/13/keyword-tagging/.

An important part of bidding that often goes overlooked is campaign structure. Before you can cluster keywords together in a relevant way (semantically, like you’re suggesting) for analysis I definitely agree that it’s good to have that baked into your account structure; our tool (WordStream) is actually built around this principle.

Great article!

By: Rob Kingston

Rob Kingston — Wed, 06 May 2009 03:08:56 +0000

You can sort of manage bids at the ad group level if you assign bids to individual keywords – but you won’t be able to show the LTV.

To do this you could setup custom reports in Analytics and use the filters below the table to exclude certain keywords or setup segments but that would probably be a lot of work especially if you keep changing your keywords/bids around.

By: Jonathan Hochman

Jonathan Hochman — Wed, 06 May 2009 02:24:54 +0000

Great idea, Chris, to segregate low volume keywords into their own ad groups. I sometimes look at a longer time period, such as three or six months, to get actionable data, but that involves a lot of waiting.