Marketology

Sentational headline alright, but I don’t entriely agree with some of the points raised. Firstly, it’s probably going to affect high-profile PPC managers   who spend hundreds of thousands on a PPC campaign. When your CAC is $ 1.50 and you earn $.60 out of it that’s a lot of money washed down the drain.

While managing larger PPC campaigns you often need to track hundreds of keywords which can be impractical and sooner or later you’ll slip up and see the campaign losing its effectiveness. For such campaigns, automation will help you focus on the analytical part and leave the basic bid management to the software. 

This approach however is not without its flaws. If you depend, for instance, only a bid management tool to manage PPC campaigns across different search engines sometimes the filters you put in place may end up missing out on important points such as differentiating between a good keyword and one that has a good click through rate. Typically this will happen when a good keyword doesn’t convert well during periods of low search volume. And as one of the filters was low click through rate, the keyword would be neglected. This is just one example. 

Personally, despite all the automation talk I think it’s very difficult to replace the human element entirely. This holds true for both big and small companies. The ideal approach would probably be a combination of automation and human management. While an automated system will help you get instant reactions to preset filters and identify patterns, you will still need the human element to make sense of the data to steer your campaign.  

Also, as many commentators have pointed out, a professional PPC manager holding a large account is expected to have a much deeper involvement with the brand he is working for and that should stand him in good stead. 

SME’s who rely on your typical ‘’automate and report’’ guys to run their campaigns don’t probably need to worry as mostly automation’s what’s been driving their boat all along anyway. In this case the number of keywords is not unmanageable and a little more involvement and thinking from the PPC manager should bring in good results.