Skip to content
Automating your pay per click campaigns mainly serves one purpose: to make Google money. Let me rephrase that: Automating your pay per click campaigns mainly serves one purpose, to make Google money, when you automate your campaigns from their start with no historical data. New campaigns starting up, being audited, or short-lived campaigns, are recommended to begin with manual cost per click. Most individuals believe that automated PPC campaign strategies are similar to the old rotisserie commercials you would see from Ronco Rotisserie, just “set it and forget it,” but unfortunately automated pay per click campaign strategies do not work efficiently this way. Large Google Ad accounts with a lot of historical data have a better chance of being managed by automated campaign strategies. Automated campaign strategies can get away from you fast if you are not careful. 
The Power of Manual CPC – Avoid Over Spending
To have more control of your Google Ads campaigns, you will want to select Manual CPC. Manual CPC gives you full control over keywords, keyword bidding, ad copy, and more. The automated bidding strategies for campaigns give you less control of the account. The algorithms are made to get as many clicks as they can for the campaign when it deems fit to act. One of the main areas that you do not want to lose a handle on is your client’s ad spend budget. With the automated strategies running, you have a huge potential to overspend on the client’s budget if it is not monitored closely.
The Importance of Ad Historical Data
If you recently created a Google Ads account, there is no historical data for the campaigns to have a base to start. Once your campaigns go live, they start to collect data. The new, fresh data being collected will help you decide which direction to steer the campaigns with better judgment. “Google needs to have enough data to make adjustments to your bid, based on what they know about how your audience responds to specific search terms. Otherwise, they’ll apply performance data from other accounts, which may or may not be relevant to your audience.”
Grabbing performance data from other accounts unrelated to your vertical does not help you. That would be, for example, as if a plumber’s Google Ads account is grabbing data from a shoe store owner’s account and applying these settings for the campaigns. The historical data from the plumber clearly cannot have the same audience as the shoe store owner. If the shoe store owner’s Google Ads are catered to the plumber’s audience with historical data then the data you get will be skewed and not accurate enough to help you make crucial directions for the shoe store owner.
As mentioned earlier, Google Ad accounts with a lot of historical data that have a better chance of being managed by automated campaign strategies. Giles Bronson from Uberly.com mentions that “If your campaigns are fresh out of Google Ads, you likely won’t have enough data to set up automated PPC campaigns effectively. You just need to make sure you’re choosing automated PPC campaigns because it’s what will be best for your dealership and not because you’re afraid to make adjustments in the beginning.”
As a pay per click Consultant, I understand this quote immensely. Pay per click, in general, is a very intimidating machine to learn, know, and understand. Creating a system for yourself helps battle the overloads and stresses of PPC. The automated bidding strategy should not be used because you want to be lazy and have the algorithms do the work for you. In this case, you are only cheating yourself and not allowing yourself to learn. You are also not allowing yourself to grow. What happens when the script or algorithm stops working, do you stop working? Of course not! Understanding manual strategies and implementing them will help create your base of understanding of what to do with a Google Ads account. Previously writing about being a pay per click coordinator, I had to create habits and form a structure to be able to handle various tasks thrown at me. The system created helped me get to work right away and efficiently work towards goals for That! Company as well as our clients.
Automation Cannot Strategize For The Future
These automated bidding strategies for your Pay Per Click campaigns have another issue. Automation for a campaign is unable to predict the future. “The biggest problem with just leaving your entire bidding process to software is that it doesn’t know anything about predicting the future. Granted, I can’t predict the future either, but I can read in a chart that the conversion rate for 11 campaigns doubled in August, so I know that I can pay twice as much per click in that time frame for the upcoming month of August as well. Software that’s only counting on historic performance can’t gamble on what will happen in the future and if you don’t take action you will lose big in your bestselling months.” This quote from the Search Engine Journal is correct. We cannot predict the future, but we have a better chance at it if we look at good solid historical data from a manual cost per click campaign to be able to see what moves to make next. If the automated strategy does not know where to look, it will predict where it should go next and that prediction most likely will be way off.
The above reasons mentioned are why you don’t want to automate your PPC campaigns. Overspending the budget, using the wrong data from other accounts unrelated to your business, letting algorithms do the lazy task work for you, and having the algorithms attempt to predict the future are reasons why you do not want to automate your pay per click campaigns. Even though there is some suggestion to use automation for larger Google Ads accounts with generous amounts of historical data, we still recommend that you do not choose this option. Automation will run your budget out of money before you get a chance to turn the campaign off. Sticking with a well-qualified company such as That! Company that has experienced pay per click consultants who can help guide you manually through an automated future. Would you rather do things properly or let a machine guess at what needs to be done next? Contact us today to get your pay per click campaigns in the right direction!
Authorship: Joseph S.
Sources:
https://www.keyppc.com/pros-and-cons-of-ppc-automation/
