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April 6, 2005

New Budget Optimizer Tool From AdWords

Google just launched a tool designed to automatically optimize your AdWords campaign. This means all you have to do is simply set your monthly budget, and Google will automatically raise and lower your CPC for each of your keywords in an attempt to achieve the highest number of clicks.

Personally, I think this may be a boon for professional PPC advertisers, though not for the reasons you may suspect. This is the type of tool that will attract novices and the lazier advertisers out there, which is a good thing. The fact that most advertisers want to run their AdWords campaign on autopilot is what keeps the medium profitable for the rest of us. The fewer advertisers who are truly managing their campaigns, the better.

As Aaron Wall points out on his blog, when you consider how far off Google's current search volume/ad clickthrough suggestions are, how accurate can we really expect their automatic bid adjustments to be? And as Mikkel deMib Svendsen implies in a comment over at ThreadWatch, leaving your PPC optimization up to Google would be akin to leaving your SEO up to Google. It's a "fox watching the henhouse" kind of situation.

Further, most automatic optimization tools tend to wreak havoc with your A/B split testing.

That said, I'm definitely going to be testing it out. I've been skeptical about Google tools in the past, and they usually end up impressing me. But I'd test the waters on something small before switching any major campaigns over to this service.

Google's AdWords FAQ has more.

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