For the first two decades of search engine marketing, savvy bid management strategies were how successful search marketers could stay ahead of the competition. Often compared to Wall Street day traders, search marketers use deep analysis and analytics to evaluate every keyword and ad in their “portfolios” to ensure that the right bids are set at every level. Bidding too low might limit your SEM campaign reach while bidding too much could waste budget that could have been used to buy more clicks and drive total channel ROI.
Of course, things have changed over the years. Today, publisher bid optimization, such as Microsoft Automated Bidding, uses machine learning and an analysis of a broad range of signals at the auction level to select the bid that is most likely to increase the volume of conversions or conversion value.
Publisher automated bidding is rapidly becoming the preferred bidding method by search marketers around the globe. According to Skai data, the share of total Paid Search spend leveraging automated bidding increased from 19% to 47% between Q3 2019 and Q3 2020.
And not only does Microsoft Automated Bidding leverage powerful intelligence from the publisher’s rich first-party data to set precise bids, but it also saves precious marketer time that can be redirected into other areas such as ad development and testing.
Even though Microsoft Automated Bidding is automated, it doesn’t mean that search marketers can’t do things on their side to improve results. For example, Skai’s Signal Enhancement helps marketers get their client-side data into Microsoft Advertising so that the automated algorithms can be smarter about what matters to advertisers and optimize bids accordingly.
And now, there’s even more that a marketer can do to help drive the performance of their publisher-led optimization.
Budget Navigator for Microsoft Automated Bidding
Skai’s Budget Navigator now enables search marketers to forecast the performance of Microsoft Automated Bidding’s popular tCPA and tROAS options to find the best return at the most efficient spend. By ensuring that the campaigns with the highest predicted performance are prioritized in the investment strategy, it opens up Microsoft Advertising’s bid optimization to be able to truly make the most profitable impact on search programs.
Skai Budget Navigator helps search marketers forecast, optimize and monitor with ease. It leverage’s innovative machine learning technology to manage budgets and adjust spend to achieve business goals.
Skai’s Budget Navigator predicts investment outcomes with enhanced forecasting
Marketers can use the “what-if” forecasting engine to uncover investment opportunities, guide budget allocation and manage budgets across Microsoft Advertising campaigns, geographies, products, and more. For example, What if I increased my daily budgets on my Microsoft Automated Bidding performance campaigns by 10%? Budget Navigator provides accurate estimates on what the best return will be.
“Skai’s Budget Navigator allowed us to optimize spend efficiency at a scale nowhere near our previous ability,” says Diogo Valente, Senior Biddable Media Manager at Kaspersky.
Benefits of Skai Budget Navigator include:
- Forecast. Predict investment outcomes with enhanced analytics. The forecast is automatically recalculated on a daily basis and new bid and budget directions are applied to the bid policies.
- Efficiency. Do more with less, at 10x the scale with relaxed data requirements and an unlimited number of portfolios in an investment.
- Optimize. Manage budgets and reallocation among portfolios during the cycle.
- Monitor. Get continuous feedback on expected results at the end of the plan period to manage budgets better. React quickly to major market dynamics with automated alerts.
“Search marketers already know that Microsoft Automated Bidding works really well,” says David Klein, Director, Business Development at Skai “By layering in campaign allocation decisions from Budget Navigator, Skai clients can make sure that Microsoft Advertising’s bid optimization is able to drive the most success.”
Microsoft Advertising + Skai for maximum performance
For the last 15 years, Skai Search has been a platform leader offering best-in-class automation, workflow efficiencies, and bid optimization. In the next era of search engine marketing, we believe that the competitive edge search marketers need will be centered on intelligence to fuel insight-driven decision-making for performance gains.
Contact us today to schedule a brief demo to learn more about how Skai Search can enhance your Microsoft Automated Bidding performance using Budget Navigator.
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