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Marty Note
Adwords is crowded, fast and dangerous these days.
When I was an Ecommerce Director we made the decision to give our $1M in PPC spend to the robots. Robots, business rules and predicitve analytics was the only way we could make what little money we made from PPC.
Attribution is a BITCH.
I remember our CFO saying, "Cut spend on everything above this line, " pointing to every branded term we were buying. Cut the top of the funnel off and you lose the bottom of the funnel. Trying to explain that to a web doubter was impossible so I ignored the demand.
Instead we tested or ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). $6 to $1 ROAS looked great...at first. As time went on we realized tighten the valve that tight cut our email list growth and the LTV (Lifetime Value) it produced in dangerous ways.
Next we tested at $1 to $1 and bleed red ink. At the time I worked for Direct Marketers (DMers) who don't believe in losing money...ever. The complex attribution math meant we were probably making solid return IF attribution was fully valued and agreed upon.
It was not. Attribution was controversial and the more immediate, the more Stimulus to Response it was the more my bosses liked it. The idea that three generations ago we built a PPC campaign that grew our list 15% and thus made us $3 To $1 was a bridge too far.
That is why I wanted to bring Marin into the mix. Marin is the best self tuning / business rule based PPC DIY Algorithm we could find. No Sale since adding Marin's "costs" seemed to lower ROAS. Once again full attribution would show Marin was going to pay for itself in no time, but didn't make that sale either.
Today's PPC market is an order of magnitude more complex. If you are still buying PPC by hand good luck with that. Too much UNDER (costs) and not nearly enough OVER (benefit) for our risk / reward palette. Better to hire an agency OR, for about the same money, DIY with a predictive management tool like Marin.
We looked at several and liked Marin the best. Its UI was understandable, installation was easy and commitment was low. We just added Marin to our list of Cool Tools in our Ask For Help Haiku Deck:
