Trade PPC Management Frustration for Automation By Michelle Megna
September 11, 2007
Managing a successful pay-per-click campaign takes a lot of time, you have to crunch numbers to be sure you're not overpaying and continually adjust keyword bidding. If you don't, you can wind up losing money, and yet for most small online business owners, it's difficult to devote enough hours to the task. Hiring someone to do it for you can be costly and means you may have less control over your marketing efforts. For those e-tailers who need a solution to this problem, SEM-in-a-Box Basic from Adapt Technologies, Inc. is worth considering.
SEM-in-a-Box Basic was released this year to help e-tailers reduce the hours of manual work involved in managing and optimizing PPC campaigns by automating data analysis and updates. SEM-in-a-Box compares actual performance data with your marketing goals.
It then provides bid recommendations to improve campaign performance, as well as recommendations for keyword addition/deletion, ad text optimization and budget allocation, plus insights on competitor activity. SEM-in-a-Box Basic offers all these features for a flat monthly fee of $299. (The company last week dropped the Basic price from $499 to $299.)
"What's different about this tool is that it offers a side-by-side comparison with competitors and allows companies to maximize their ads and leads. The 'budget' feature easily allows users to identify how to best tweak the budget so you're not putting money in the wrong places," said Christopher Upkes, director of sales and client services for Adapt Technologies, Inc.
"You can also clone your Google account and transfer it to Yahoo. And, with the 'competitive tool' you can visually compare how much coverage and presence you and your competitors have."
Control Center: Dashboard offers a snapshot of your campaign performance.
The interface is easy to navigate, with tabs for the categories "manage," "tools," "reports" and "settings" at the top of the page. Under manage, for instance, you see your dashboard and get recommendations for action, and under tools, you will find keyword bidding tools and comparative analysis charts.
PPC Profit by the Dashboard Light SEM-in-a-Box doesn't require any downloads or installations. You log in through your browser and see a dashboard that shows you the information. From there, you get a quick snapshot of your initiatives and a glimpse of how they are performing compared to goals you've set. This includes a chart detailing CPA activity averaged out to account for short-term fluctuations, as well as highlights of trends in your accounts.
Priorities for Profits: Automated bid recommendations.
The performance overview data includes date ranges, for example, for yesterday, last week, this month and last month and the corresponding impressions, clicks, conversions, cost and so on. To see the information on one campaign, you simply click on it to drill down for details. To change a goal or create a new initiative, you click on the "manage initiatives link." From there, you are prompted to select either "target cost per click" for CPC or "target cost per acquisition" for CPA campaigns and then enter a dollar amount.
But where the product really shines is in its automated recommendations and comparative analysis. Under tools/recommendations, you get a detailed, prioritized report that tells you how your campaign is performing compared to your set goal — and what to do about it. The recommendations page can be customized to show suggestions just for keyword bids, or, say, to show just high priority recommendations.
For example, under "high priority recommendations" you will see a table outlining low performing keywords, with, say, "decrease bid to 13 cents" and a "do it" link that automatically adjusts it. The page also displays underperforming ads that need to be investigated.
"If you're not sure why something is being recommended, you can mouse over it, and drill down to a table with all the data used to make the decision and get a narrative on why you should follow it," said Upkes. He added that you can also change keyword bids individually or by batch.
Additionally, you can get recommendations on poor performing ads with suggestions for deleting those that aren't worth the money. The product will analyze the text in your ad and its performance. "Ad recommendations ID ones that are not converting, so if you see one converts 58 percent of the time, but another only does 18 percent, you know you want to delete it or rewrite it," said Upkes, "It could take you a whole morning just to crunch those numbers, and that's just for one scenario."
Go on Recon: Get the inside scoop on your competitors.
Studying the Competition In regard to analysis, SEM-in-a-Box shows you how you stack up against the competition with its "competitive landscape" feature. This shows you several graphs that chart the competitors on your top 20 keywords, their ads, the keywords you have in common and where you rank amongst them.
Another advantage to the product is that it's extremely flexible — you can pretty much set it on auto-pilot to make adjustments, such as updating bids, adding or deleting keywords, for you based on goals you set. Or, you can choose which changes you want to make yourself.
Upkes sums up the benefits of SEM-in-a-Box like this: "It's like a dishwasher, you could wash the dishes yourself, but instead, you can close the door and know exactly what's going on in there, but not have to do it yourself, know the steps are being taken to get to the goal, clean the dishes. Doing them by hand doesn't make sense, so it's a no-brainer to use the automated tool."
Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.
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