Originall posted by Search Engine Land, data collected by JupiterResearch from 103 agencies and advertisers spending at least $50,000/month in paid search shows how they would be willing to spend up to 22% more if they had better PPC management software.
According to the survey, between 18-25% of search marketers are still using Excel to calculate bids, for reporting and analytics, linking engine data to conversion data and editing creatives. Out of these five, linking conversion data to your engine data is most important. It allows you to quickly see performance of your account and keywords in order to quickly see any issues before they become into larger scale problems. Also, if your software can’t match up conversion data to your engine data, then you can’t really have any type of bid optimization at all anyways. The others can many times be done quicker in Excel just because any “quick adjustments” that are made are usually much harder to perform when working with 3rd party software. The easiest example I can think of is undoing your work. Many times, online software doesn’t allow you to go back one step at a time like Excel does, if at all, so any mistakes that are made (or if you simply want to change what you originally put in), you usually have to start from scratch.
Having a mix between using Excel and paid search software is usually an ideal solution in order to make account management efficient. 3rd part software only will do whatever the programmers tell it to do and with Excel being extremely powerful, it is usually more flexible - especially for analyzing data. Getting rid of tedious and error prone activities such as linking engine data to conversion data and account setup are what software developers should be working on allowing PPC marketers to have more time for analysis and strategy.
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