New PPC Bid Rule Management System from Acquisio

One of my responsibilities as director of PPC (among everything else) at Fuel Interactive is to keep tabs on what’s going on in the PPC management tools and software world.  This will be the first of a series of posts I’ll do about the current state of those tools.

Acquisio’s PPC Management Tools for Agencies

Acquisio targets their PPC management tools to the agency crowd. Among everything else they offer, their pricing structure is one of the most agreeable even for smaller agencies. In other posts I’ll look at PPC management services that really are only good for the huge e-commerce stores. Acquisio provides great affordable tools for the little guy. We’ve used their service at Fuel Interactive, so I can speak from firsthand knowledge.

The highlights of Acquisio’s service include:

Sleek, professional looking reports: Our clients were impressed with these. They’re great- create them and next month all you have to do is change the date range (well apart from your intelligent human comments and suggestions, right?). The only hassle is that anytime you create new campaigns, you have to manually set those up in your report.

Multi-Engine Efficiency: Work easily across the engines- reports and bulk (“mass”) editor tool help you work efficiently across Google, Yahoo, and MSN PPC engines.

Optimize Campaign Results Quickly: Their “Campaign Optimizer” wowed me when I first saw it- use sliders to tell the tool which metrics you care most and least about maximizing, and the tool will tell you the most efficient way to get better results.

Move The Metric Sliders According to Your Goals

As Marc Poirier, CMO of Acquisio puts it, “this is a great way to impress a new client- you can show them you know what you’re doing and can get results, and then that frees you to get to work with the bid rule tool.” We found, and Marc admits, this tool is great for spending less money to increase efficiency, but not for expanding campaigns, and doesn’t do everything a bid rule tool can.

Sample Campaign Optimizer Results

Most Flexible, Coolest PPC Bid Rule Tool in the Galaxy?

If you’ve been doing PPC for any length of time on multiple client accounts, you begin to understand the complexity of all the different optimizations you can do on each campaign.  You may have a personal preference or an agency policy about how to deal with things like low quality score keywords, or ad positions that are too low or too high.  If so, you have to keep tabs on these manually… or use a bid rule tool.

If you use a bid rule tool, it will either be set up to make changes automatically, or it may have something like Acquisio’s semi-automatic option.  That means you can review the optimizations before approving them.

Marc says, compared to other tools in the business (I’ll let them argue me in the comments and update the post if I’m wrong), Acquisio’s bid rule engine (view video):

• Is more flexible: more conditions and more actions
• Semi-automatic: approve optimizations before they go live
• Simulations: see what would happen if you ran your new rule right now
• Logs: keeps track of all changes and will allow for roll back to specific dates
• Expression builder: this is really cool and totally unique- you can include in your actions numbers figured out from the actual metrics in your campaign- see the picture below. Acquisio plans to eventually allow you to use this in your conditions too.

The Acquisio Expression Builder

Lastly, a couple of the benefits of using reports and bid rule tools:

1. Once things are running, you can add more clients without expanding human resources quite as quickly.
2. If you have the reports and bid rules running smoothly, staff turnover is not the disaster it would be if everything were manual.