Anybody got any recommendations?
Not looking for fancy white label reporting, all for in house use, management of the account is the focus.
I don't know of any reasonably priced PPC software. At my current job they were using a package for $5k/month and it didn't do a very good job. I've been using my own system for years for affiliate PPC marketing. I ended up scrapping the commercial system and employing mine.
The trick is to take a long and a short data point, calculate EPC vs CPC, look at traffic & rank changes and then adjust bids accordingly. I use a web script to do this and then export to a format that can be imported into Adwords using the desktop application. I'm not really answering your question... The only low cost tools I've seen out there have been junk that don't allow for keyword level optimization. It has been a while though, they may have improved.
Are you going to be able to measure conversions at the keyword & adgroup level? Is your campaign going to be on the smaller side? You may be able to get by with using formulas and spreadsheets and still be able to manage a campaign efficiently.
It's a big campaign with big budget. I wouldn't have a problem with 5k a month and works great.
When I was doing work for makemetop in the USA there were a number of good competitors.
I just looked an not a single one still exists today. SAD
Two agency type companies I've worked with that have their own PPC management tools are eSearchVision & iCrossing -- both are pretty pricy.
Dumb question: what does PPC management software achieve that you can't already do with AdWords' own tools?
Basically, maximize ROI with real data. In ecommerce situations you may be able to report sales data to G, but what that is in the moment of the transaction and what that ends up being after shipping complications or cancellations can be very far apart.
For instance, I manage about 300 thousand keywords and match types in Google and Bing. I have a set of rules that looks at real data and makes adjustments -- then I manually look at the changes to make sure they make scene with what I know about whats going on in the market, seasonality ans such.
Google offers automatic bidding where you can set up cost per acquisition, but the best you are going to do with that is approximations based on the data you are able to feed Google. You will have to rely on their bidding algorithm though and most of the independent data I've seen out there shows that it doesn't do as well as manual bidding.
Tolls can manage 1,000,000 KWs in real time.
We did it for Yahoo! in the UK and kept track of sales per second.
When it get BIG ya new a tool.
http://www.icrossing.com/icrossing-paul-doleman
We're handing mio $ budgets each month and the SEM team is pretty fond of.. well.. Doubleclick Search (Google):
https://ddm.google.com/ds/cm/cm
>>Doubleclick Search (Google)
I would worry that Google's tools stack the deck to make AdWords appear more impactful than other channels
>>the SEM team is pretty fond
Of course they are ;) It makes them look good
>> Google's tools stack the deck
well in fairness tools only report on things, if you use it properly the tool itself can't stack any decks :)
both doubleclick and mediaplex are pretty much equally frustrating in my experience, it seems like if you're hands on day to day you can do almost what you want with them and if you're not they make you want to throw things out of the window. Doubleclick fits with more other tools out of the box. And on the flipside of that when Google make changes they break doubleclick less often and for less long than they break any non Google owned tool, from what I've heard.
How much that matters depends on how clever you want to get i guess, if its just about bid management then you can probably get almost anything working well enough If you want to be inserting dynamic pricing and countdown clocks the hassle of them breaking more often could top you over the edge?
Wordstream and aquisio are the ones that always pop up when I search. I'm looking for some software myself but I really have no idea what the difference is between them.
I also have been wondering about how the newer 'ecommerce tags' that came online a while ago (that allow you to calculate ROI) changed the game, when I read older articles. In other words, things seem to change quite a bit over time and I'm sure some of the tools that were created, ended up losing what made them special. It seems Google doesn't really like this secondary ppc software market. I was reading somewhere where Google changed its phone number policy and all the third party companies that helped track clicks to calls by providing numbers are now SOL.
I did a free trial of Wordstream a few weeks ago and I didn't discover a single thing it could accomplish for me that I couldn't already do within AdWords itself for no cost.
There might be something but I didn't find it.
the big benefit of third party software for me is that you can track multiple channels through it - so you can optimise adwords really well, but if you're using non GDN display ads, or looking at organic traffic from Bing, or trying to find out of your affiliate traffic is goalhanging from your ppc campaignn, can you dedupe effectively across them using it?
:) What Gurtie said :)
I finally tracked down the folks in Russian who did the programming for Barry.
They run a 40 person shop.
PM me for FB contact if interested.
>the folks in Russian
Got a couple of them on Skype as well..
Roman is good people, for a Russian :o