Eric Enge recently published an article called "Are Bid Management Tools Still Useful?" on ClickZ Search Engine Watch (http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3626132). The article reviews a session at the recent Search Engine Expo conference about whether or not bid management is dead. According to Enge, "The panelists ultimately agreed that bid management is a useful tool, but that in today's advertising environment you need to do much more in addition to what the bid management tool can do."
We couldn't agree more. That's why we continue to make DART Search a comprehensive search management platform. Bid management is a core component, certainly, but there's much more to our product. Here are a few of the features in DART Search in addition to automated bid management:
Geographic Targeting -- Currently supported for Google (Yahoo! support is coming soon).
Budget Management & Reporting -- Get budget alerts via email, change multiple budgets at once automatically, and monitor your spend versus your budget. Fully supported for Google, Yahoo, MSN. Also, ask your DoubleClick representative about the daily offline Google Budget Cap Alert Report.
Match Types -- Supported for Google, Yahoo! and MSN. This gives you another dimension to work with as you drive the most relevant traffic to your site.
Content Targeting -- A great way to drive traffic to your site is to advertise on Google's AdSense network. DART Search offers full support for AdSense via Content Targeting. Site Targeting is also available -- it's currently in beta.
Ad Trafficking & Synching -- Via the APIs of the major search engines, DART Search allows you create multiple ads per Ad Group and have the ads automatically trafficked to the search engines. We also synchronize each ad nightly to ensure the status of your ads (live, paused, etc.) is accurately reflected in the interface.
Yahoo! Ad Quality Score -- To help you manage your ads on Yahoo's new relevancy-based platform, we collect and display the quality score for each Yahoo ad managed via DART Search.
Google Quality Based Bidding -- DART Search collects Google's quality minimum bids every day to help you keep your programs live.
De-duplication with Display Advertising -- Paid search marketing is one piece of your larger online media mix. It's important that your conversions be attributed to the appropriate ads. If you are using DART for Advertisers for your display advertising, your conversions are automatically deduplicated -- the ad (search or display) with the last click "wins" the attribution.
Click Fraud Monitoring -- DART Search collects the daily count of clicks directly from the search engines. DART Search also counts every click that it redirects. These are called "visits" to distinguish them from search engine clicks. DART Search reporting allows you to compare visits to clicks directly so that you can estimate how many fraudulent clicks are removed by the search engines.
There's much more to search marketing than bid management. That's why there's much more to DART Search, too.