Mark,
We reviewed six to eight different ppc mgmt solutions before settling on
Aquisio, which we're giving about a six month trial right now. Aquisio made
sense to us given our specific client load, client types, our reporting
needs, our agency structure and PPC services pricing, the new features
they're releasing this summer, etc.- But the right vendor for you will
depend on your needs and spend. For us, part of the decision was that the
solution had to make us more effective and more efficient- no matter how
powerful the tool was, if it was going to take more time than doing it
manually, we couldn't go that way, at least not right now.
For you, it sounds like you need to split all those into multiple campaigns,
and then use a ppc mgmt solution that uses the "portfolio approach"- that
means being able to, within the third party tool, designate your own keyword
groupings regardless of what adgroup or campaign they're in. You might even
be able to place the same keyword in multiple portfolios- I didn't look that
deeply into it, because it's not a huge need of ours at this time. I know
SearchForce does this, and maybe others do. I'm not sure if you can do #3
with SF.
The best thing to do is contact several ppc solution companies and schedule
demos and walk-throughs, and ask them all your questions. I had considered
doing a blog post about what we'd found about the various solutions, but
some of them are frequently changing and upgrading- pricing changes, etc.-
so my info would go out of date and not do them justice- in fact, one
company compared themselves to another based on old information about their
competitor- I'd suggest doing some due diligence in conversation with these
companies' sales reps.
I'm sure there are many reason to segment your campaigns the way you plan
to- possibly for tracking spends and performance- but I've found a big
factor in PPC mgmt to be the amt of time it takes to analyze and optimize
compared to the improvement in results- i.e. there's a point of diminishing
returns on the value you're creating compared to the cost of your labor. I
suppose if there were a formula for figuring that out... well it's pretty
complicated ;-)
I think over the next few years as the solutions mature and agencies and
freelancers get their processes down, we'll see more clarity in which vendor
is right for which situations... for example there was a vendor, whose name
escapes me, that would be my #1 choice for managing campaigns with thousands
of e-commerce products, because of their specific time-saving tools for
creating the keywords and ads.
Hope that helps,
Brian
--
Brian Carter
Fuel Interactive
Director of Search Marketing
http://www.fuelinteractive.com
http://www.twitter.com/briancarter
http://www.linkedin.com/in/briancarterms
