Pay Per Click (PPC) Bid Monitoring and Management SoftwareEver seen a pay per click search engine tell you that you're bidding too high on a keyword? Not likely! Instead you sit in front of your computer for hours on end tweaking bids... ...increasing bids to maintain position, or reducing bids to close a gap and save money. Boring, right? And the worst part is , you have to do it all over again tomorrow and the day after... There is an easier way... A new breed of software is available now to both monitor and manage your bids for you automatically while you engage in more productive activities. Originally developed for GoTo.com (now Overture, the grand-daddy of PPC's) PPC Bid Management Software now services the top dozen PPC search engines. These bid optimization programs not only save you a lot of time, they save your hard-to-come-by dollars as well. Certain search engines (SE's); Google, FindWhat and Overture especially, have started to build-in a few of the features commonly found in PPC Bid Management Software. At this point in time and for the forseeable future the 3rd party software offers far more functionality in favor of the advertiser, with the advantage of a common interface for multiple SE's. How much an hour is your time worth to you? Seriously, think about it, then multiply your weekly bid adjustment time by 52 weeks. If you were realistic, that's a lot of money! Read on to find out how to achieve better results for a fraction of the time and cost! PPC bid monitoring and management software falls into two main categories:
Performance on PC based systems depends on your PC's processor, RAM, Internet connection speed and availability. PC based management of PPC search engine campaigns seems to have become the preferred method for advertisers, with Bidrank and Dynamic KeywordBid Maximizer dominating the market. Overture limit bid changes by automatic bid management software. To prevent abuse they have only approved certain bidding tools for use with their system. If you are planning to bid on Overture, make sure you use one of the approved bid programs. Manual bids are unaffected. Espotting have taken similar steps to Overture, so a trend seems to be emerging. The number of bid managers in the PPC market is reducing due to consolidation in the industry so be careful in your selection of bidding software. Already PPCBidMaximizer has been bought by SavePerClick who in turn were bought out by ClickPatrol, who later closed down after helping clients migrate to Go Toast (now AtlasOnePoint). We have also included information on Google AdWords and AdSense, plus recommended resources to help advertisers and webmasters get the most out of these programs.
The following pages contain more detailed information on the different bidding tools available, plus AdWords and AdSense -
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