Bid Buddy re-brand as Searchware4: will it work?

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December 5th, 2007 by Nick

Bid Buddy is about to launch their new management software codenamed Project Mexico, and have re-branded as Searchware4. Why it was called that, I do not know, but will it be of benefit to clients?

I have had a sneak previous of the new platform and it does look nicer. A lick of paint on the interface and it looks more presentable. The layout and format is easier to use and look at, and you can find anything with 2 clicks. That is a good approach, one which any website owner should adopt, however the question is do the functionality within bid buddy make it an effective tool?

There are other questions to ask, like is software applicable for managing PPC accounts? I have a member of staff that is happy to manually manage clients because it is safer to do than to let software do it for you. We can apply rules to campaigns and say that this is what you want to achieve, however is volume of conversions taken into consideration? For one client that we used software on, the volume of conversions completely dropped off, however the CPA target that we had set it at was achieved.

Therefore there is an issue with volume. Bid Buddy have updated this functionality so that the software takes into consideration the volume of conversions that are received so it will negate this problem in the future. I would still say that software is applicable, but only for large corporate clients who have thousands of products, making it physically impossible to manually manage the bids and optimise the campaigns on a daily basis.

The functionality has been improved to a degree, and I would say that Bid Buddy is a great platform to manage campaigns on for relatively large SMEs, however for corporate clients, analytics is a very important part of web marketing. Bid Buddy tracking negates Analytics and everything that is tracked by analytics comes in as organic. Other flaws in the new platform is that you can’t download everything into Excel, make changes, and then upload the changes. This makes manual changes very difficult, even though updating campaigns has been made easier than it is on the existing platform.

You also can’t track rich media, which is very important when you are a full service marketing agency.

Omniture, who is Bid Buddy’s competitor, does offer solutions to these issues raised above. You are also able to download everything into an Excel plug in and translate campaigns into Yahoo and MSN at the click of button – far easier than is currently available on Bid Buddy or any of the mainstream search engines, for that matter. Omniture sounds like the perfect solutions; to which I would say it was, however at 9% of budget as management, it is not the perfect price and balancing act between benefits and price becomes really apparent.

Therefore, Project Mexico is an improvement, but there are still further developments that can be made in the world of automated management software.

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