Why manual bidding still makes sense

The battle between the convenience of automation in Google Search and the insights and learnings—often extensible—that manual bidding creates is a common theme of our blog posts.

There’s no question that Google is incenting automation by investing heavily in their autobidder services. It makes sense if you’re Google to be doing this. In a business such as advertising, revenue is volatile. The first thing companies (especially large ones) do when things get tough financially is to slow or stop advertising spend.

They often slow or stop advertising spend for other reasons too—such as inconsistent results, political infighting, employee changes, distractions, and neglect. Automation addresses all of these, as Google’s incentives to invest in regular, reliable, and consistent spending are clear.

Add to that the level of technology investment that only the fox guarding the henhouse can create, and you have a perfect formula to run away from manual control of an advertising program like Google Search.

Layer on the blame factor… if Google’s running the campaigns and they go wrong, it’s hard to blame anyone but Google—and you have an almost perfect scenario for automation.

But that’s only half the story.

Manual bidding keeps control with you. It allows you to see every bid, every move, and every good, bad, and ugly decision you make. Those learnings—if you have time to find and absorb them—are useful for the advertising you do with other publishers. And those learnings are valuable.

Without them, the ways you can best your competitors are fewer. The avenues to improve your overall marketing performance are less clear. And the path to better decision-making is obtuse.

This is particularly true because the publisher in question here is Google—the 800 lb gorilla of marketing and advertising.

So why would you continue to choose full Google automation?

1. You don’t have time to investigate, analyze, and absorb learnings from your Google Search efforts.

2. Google isn’t a significant part of your marketing mix and is unlikely to ever be one.

3. Performance marketing isn’t important to what you do, and there are no other performance programs that you invest in—or seek to invest in—that Google Search is relevant to.

4. You’re under-resourced, and the amount of time you or your team have to spend on Google Search is so limited that manual bidding would be a story of neglect, not innovation.
   

What other reasons drive people to choose automation vs. manual bidding? Why did you choose the route you chose for your program?

If you’ve switched approaches over the years, why did you do so—and are you happy with your decision?