Last week, we explored the importance of using a smart bid optimization tool to choose the right bids for your keywords. But even smart bids can quickly become irrelevant in a dynamic search landscape. That's why "speed" is as important as "smarts" when it comes to effective bid management. An effective search management platform must also execute quickly to make use of every opportunity. So today, we’ll dive deeper into the ‘speed’ of a bid optimization tool as we address the fourth question to consider when choosing a bid optimization platform:
4. Is your platform fast enough to make a difference in my campaigns?
Aside from knowing what to bid, the best bid optimization platforms also know when to bid. Simply evaluating keywords for bidding once per day isn’t enough to achieve today’s complex and unique marketer goals. Look for a tool that responds quickly to emerging patterns, and evaluates keywords multiple times throughout the day, using the most recent data, with bid frequencies increasing when it matters most -- during high-volume periods.
Take, for example, a change in seasonality. Right after the holidays, we might find that there’s a rise in searches for the query “discount Santa suits”. To take advantage of this shift, marketers selling Santa suits need to react immediately to get their message in front of these prospective customers. Your bid platform should be able to bid immediately on newly relevant keywords, and further, evaluate these keywords frequently throughout the day to help you benefit from this short-lived opportunity.
With decades of search experience behind us, we know that speed is the difference between seized and lost opportunities. That’s why we designed the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite to respond and execute bids quickly, to help you best achieve your goals in an ever-changing search space. Our bid engine performs intra-day evaluation for all keywords, and can bid up to four times a day to help reach a marketer’s defined goal. Intra-day engine data, coupled with ‘instant’ conversion data, means that the Performance Bidding Suite has the freshest data available to make the quickest, most relevant decisions to deliver high-impact campaigns.
Topics we’ve discussed so far in this blog series -- data recency, smarts, speed -- are all directly influenced by a bid management platform's algorithms, or the software programs that allow the tool to analyze and execute on external signals. Algorithms, then, sit at the crux of a bid tool’s success in achieving a marketer’s goals. And because the search space continues to change at an accelerated pace, it’s important for the algorithms themselves to keep up. Next week, we’ll dive deeper into the importance of finely-tuned and frequently updated algorithms, answering the fifth question to consider: How often do you refine your algorithms?
To learn more about the 7 factors to consider, download our white paper here.
