Automated bidding
Some bid management solutions provide “recommended” bids, but don’t actually set bids automatically. For large accounts with millions of placements, lack of automation is a show stopper. OptiMine automatically sets bids every day.
Global optimization
Many bid management solutions simply provide business rules that attempt to protect profit; for example, setting the maximum cost per click to 75 of the historical profit per click. This is not nearly as effective as true optimization across all placements. OptiMine performs global optimization every day to get the best overall return.
Bid Testing cost controls
Any solution that uses statistical models (i.e., data mining) requires “bid testing” in order to get a variety of performance observations. For prospects with low profit margins or tight advertising budgets, the fixed bid testing costs of some existing solutions far exceeds the value that optimization can bring. OptiMine allows customers to set budgets for bid testing and to spread the testing over long periods of time.
Coverage over all placements
Some bid management solutions only work on “head terms” that have daily impressions, clicks, and conversions. For many accounts, the head terms only represent a small fraction of the overall paid search cost and value. The majority of the cost and value is often in the “tail terms” that are left un-modeled and un-optimized. OptiMine uses advanced analytics techniques to model more tail terms.
Transparency of bids
Other bid management solutions set bids without providing any explanation of how the bids were derived or providing an override mechanism. OptiMine's solution gives the key reasons why each bid was selected and allows users to manually override or halt automatic bidding for any keyword or group of keywords.
Flexibility of business goals
Some bid management solutions are only able to deal with a narrow set of conditions, especially with respect to the business goal. A common problem that few solutions deal with is a lag between the click event and the resulting business value. For example, a two-week free trial may or may not result in a sale two weeks later. With OptiMine you can optimized to your own business metric, whatever it is, from clicks to basket size to session profit to customer lifetime value to channel ROI.
In-house Software or software-as-a-service
None of the current bid management “market leaders” provide installable software. They all use either a software-as-a-service or an agency business model. Many customers with large paid search spend want to install and control their own bid management application, and integrate with existing in-house marketing automation systems. OptiMine gives you the choice to install and operate the solution yourself, or to have us host it.
How it works
OptiMine’s approach first uses automated data mining to develop individual performance models for each ad placement, and then optimization techniques to set bids to meet an advertiser’s lead generation or customer acquisition goals. All this happens while satisfying business constraints such as minimum ROAS or maximum spend. This approach has significant advantages:
- Bid setting is automated at a placement level even well out into the “long tail”
- Bids can be optimized to any business metric such as cost per acquisition, ROAS, revenue, or profit
- System immediately responds to market changes like day-of-week and competitive bids
- Scales to millions of placements
Example Actual In-Market Customer Results: A 48% reduction in cost-per-acquisition
