Are your paid search marketing strategies stuck in the past? If you haven’t noticed, things are moving pretty fast. For example, five years ago your computer would probably have had half the CPU speed, a quarter of the RAM, and a tenth of the hard drive space than common computers today. Growing competition and an ever-evolving online marketing landscape is causing SEM bid management strategies to change just as quickly. This leads to many questions for search marketers:

• Small campaigns that used to provide high volumes at low cost have now been replaced by large lists of long tail keywords. How can you avoid missed opportunities by investing your scarce time and budget with the highest efficiency and profitability?

• How can you identify which situations must be handled by an actual human being and which parts of your account can be automated? Once the highest priority bid adjustments have been reviewed by human eyes, how can a bid automation platform be taught to use the same decision framework on the rest of the account? Even the most experienced SEM professional is limited in the number of intelligent bid decisions that can be manually applied in a day; however, certain parts of any PPC portfolio are too critical to turn over completely to a machine. We must embrace both methods of bid management – manual adjustments and automated review.

• How can bid algorithms be organized to maintain clear logic while optimizing to the most appropriate and relevant metrics for each keyword segment? How can SearchCenter’s new templates be adapted to fit the metrics and thresholds of your unique situation? How can other newly introduced functionality enable you to more effectively leverage the rich data sets you are already collecting through Omniture systems?

• Many search marketers used to focus primarily on return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) or cost-per-action (CPA). How can you ensure your efforts are truly improving your company’s bottom line by including offline conversions, cost of goods sold, and other factors in the calculation of real profit?

Once manual and automated bid management has been adopted and properly balanced, and the most precise business metrics are being employed in those approaches, paid search marketers are more available to dive into other campaign management tactics that really pay off – such as reviewing search query lists, refining match types, improving campaign targeting, aligning relevant messaging, and testing landing pages.

We will be discussing these and many other important “How can…” questions of search marketing 2010 during the “Evolving Profit Maximization Algorithms for Paid Search using SearchCenter” session at this year’s Summit. See you there!