Pay Per Click Bid Management Strategies

Managing your pay per click keyword bid values can be a time-consuming and tedious task. It can also be incredibly stressful. For the few among us who can afford to pay others for their services, having someone else manage the job is an option. For the remainder of us, some other bid management strategy is called for. Usually one involving software.

Fortunately, the most important part of the bid management process involves looking at campaign performance, and this IS something that can be determined by applying suitable software to the ad campaign while it is running. Of course, what I am talking about is conversion tracking software. This is software that tracks every click taken by a prospect as they follow one of your pay per click ads all the way through to the merchant Thank You page which is shown after a successful sale.

Most pay per click marketers are not the merchants themselves, but affiliates of the merchant who earn a commission with every sale. Because of this I am going to assume that you are an affiliate looking to optimize the bids on your campaigns for maximum profitability. In particular, you'd like to remove from your campaigns all those ads and keywords that are costing you money because they are being clicked on, but they are not making you any sales. For those keywords that remain, you would like to know whether to increase or decrease your bid values to improve your return on investment.

In order to track a prospect, you can either add tracking IDs to the destination URLs that go into your advertisements, or (less widely known) you can add tracking IDs on the fly. In the latter case each visitor gets their own unique tracking ID, and this can be used to infer a great deal of information about not only the performance of your adverts, but also the customers that ultimately bring in a commission for you.

One such piece of conversion tracking software that performs on the fly tracking ID generation is Jeremy Palmer's Optimize My Site application. Jeremy is well-known in the affiliate marketing industry as a super affiliate who spends hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on pay per click advertising. He developed his software as a personal tool to allow him to see how his ad campaigns were performing at the keyword level and beyond.

After several years of refining his conversion tracking tool he decided to release the application as an inexpensive commercial product for affiliates. Now that he has, Optimize My Site has been receiving some very good press, and customers have supported Jeremy's contention that this is the best ad tracking application on the market.

But how accurate are the claims?

Well, I decided to have a closer look at the software recently, and I have now written an in-depth review on my Optimize My Site Review page. There you will discover why I used the term "flash of genius" to describe Jeremy's implementation of the ad conversion tracking, and you will see why this pay per click optimization software has earned high marks from those who have used it.