PPC Automation: Robots vs Humans

Posted by drew on December 12, 2007 at 02:21 PM

Searching on the Internet can be a highly emotional experience. Users respond emotionally to the content they see, even ads. Whether the ads pertain to lead-generation or e-commerce, an emotional response triggers the user to investigate beyond the advertisement.

As a PPC manager, I research and analyze many of these emotional triggers in an effort to improve my campaigns. So, why would a business not want my services? Because there is buzz in the PPC industry that automation is more effective than having an individual manage your paid search campaigns.

Take shelter; the great Robot-Human war has begun!

There is an obvious reason for implementing PPC automation: Cost. Some of the automated services offer a flat fee to run your campaigns, keeping your costs steady and regulated. And with an automated system managing your campaigns, less time is spent on PPC management tasks.

Sadly, both of these points also lead to one very big downside: lack of personalized management.

Less time may be spent, but that time will be spent on managing the campaign to a set of rules, not flexible marketing initiatives and goals. Costs may be less, but will you see the return on your investment? Or, could your return on investment be higher with an actual PPC manager?

Another argument I've heard in favor of PPC automation is that the company using the service has more control over the campaign. One would think, when using an automation service, that the tendency would be to "set it and forget it." If that is not the case, a user is still needed to align the service to work with the overall marketing goals. This is no different than clearly communicating your marketing objectives to your PPC manager. Then your PPC manager can actively make adjustments to campaigns that align with your marketing objectives.

Finally, PPC automation services may offer suggestions of ad copy optimization, keyword addition/deletion and overall campaign performance, but again, these services are based on computational rules, not rational human thought. Can these rules decipher human emotion?

An automation service can't understand an emotional response from a user, or perform the follow up research to find out why the user responds as such and maximize ROI based on that response.

A good PPC manager will be able to dig further and find out more about your customers than any service. If they're smart, a PPC manager will even share that data with you to help grow the rest of your marketing initiatives.

Category
Pay-Per-Click

Comments (0)