Every seasoned Growth marketer has seen this situation: paid search is working well for you and you’re trying to shift traffic to organic clicks from paid clicks to boost ROAS…but your competitors are bidding on the terms where you have organic coverage, which pushes you (or your CEO’s ego pushes you) to keep bidding even though you have the organic coverage. This can happen in long tail organic search scenarios and can get VERY expensive in brand search situations where you are forced to bid on your own brand terms where you have great organic coverage because your competitors are bidding on top of them.
I've been working with a company that has developed very clever automated bid management technology specifically for managing paid search bids when a company also has relevant organic search results. The result in the right situations is a very dramatic boost in ROAS. Huge thanks to Growth guru Steven Johnson for the kind introduction.
Here’s what this technology does:
1. Continual Monitoring of Your Bids, Your Organic Placements and Your Competitors: Every six minutes, the tool uses 3rd party data to monitor your Google paid search ads, your Google organic search rankings for those terms, and your competitors bidding on your paid search terms (if any).
2. Strategic Bid Adjustments: When your organic content is in the top organic spot for a paid search term with no active competitor bids, the system automatically lowers your bid to $0.01 CPC. This keeps your ad in play but at a $0.01 click and blocks PMAX from overbidding. In the event a competitor begins bidding on that term, the tool immediately adjusts your bid back upwards to block out your competitors attack.
This approach ensures minimal spend on terms you already dominate organically, improving ROAS by automatically reducing your "Google tax" payments when you don't need to pay them.
I’ve partnered with this company. If you have any questions or would like an introduction to them, hit me at rob@growthish.com.
If you know of other unique growth marketing tools or service providers I should investigate, please send them my way.
Image courtesy of ChatGTP, prompted with “Please give me the perfect image for this post in a modern minimal 1960s style in grayscale with no text on the image”.