Sun Jan 06 17:02:44 PST 2019

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On top of the free, built-in tracking feature, Google also bought Urchin and re-
branded it as Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free, and perhaps as full-
featured as the most premium conversion tracking tool, but if you use it, you are
sending your valuable market data back to your source of traffic. That may work
against you if they use your best converting terms and most frequent referrals to
recommend keywords to your competitors. If you were Google and you sold
traffic to multiple competitors, would you recommend my best words to my
competitors to drive up profits?
For smaller players who do not have much time and money to invest into analytics
Google might be fine. But if you run a large and complex campaign you might not
want to share your conversion stats with Google. Google does offer some
compelling features that make it appealing to try, such as traffic funnel reports and
keyword earnings based on AdWords ad position.
Bid Management Software
There are automated software programs that will track your bids and change them
multiple times a day so that you achieve optimal efficiency with your ads. These
programs can do various things, such as list your site relative to another website,
bid to a maximum lead cost, or other similar functions. However, some of the
major search providers are rendering some of these features useless, either through
replicating them or by obfuscating data. For example, if a search engine does not
disclose bid prices, you can?t bid jam competitors, and Google AdWords allows
advertisers to schedule ad delivery time and bid to position.
The best part of bid management software is that good bid management software
can allow you to dynamically change the bid price from price-per-click to other
metrics such cost-per-action or ROI.
If you get big into pay-per-click search engines and are managing multiple
accounts, it is worth using a bid management program to help save time and
money. Currently, three market leaders in this field are BidRank (downloadable
software
, Keyword Max (hosted software application
, and Atlas OnePoint
(hosted software application
.
Fraud Prevention Software
Most major pay-per-click search engines have fraud protection built into their
system to protect the value of click prices. Google, for example, will allow you to
see how many invalid clicks you had within the AdWords platform.
You should use your server logs to validate clicks if you are running a large
campaign. Generally due to time overlaps and differences in reporting, it is
considered acceptable to have an error up to 10%. If your error is much larger
than that, be sure to notify the search engine.