How to Escape Excel Hell, Increase Responses, and Decrease CPC

Tired of spending hours entering data and adjusting the budgeting and bids for your clients but can't see a better way? There is light at the end of the tunnel. Here's how to use Acquisio's Bid and Budget Management tool to decrease cost per click and increase the time you have for other important activities—like strategizing and innovating to keep your clients ahead of the curve.

Still creating complex calculations to manage the budget pacing for all your clients? We know lead volume tends to be really low at the beginning of the month and then spikes at the end of the month, and we all need a way to manage our bids and budgets. But there has to be a way out of manually adjust your bid modifiers, right? If your hours of complicated Excel calculations are only generating a 10–15% savings in cost per click, we need to talk.

So right now, you’re probably spending at least an hour a day—per client—going to each search engine and then loading data into a spreadsheet that shows your budget, how much you’ve spent, and how much you have left to spend per day—and you have to do that for every single engine. Google. Bing. Yahoo. Baidu. And on and on.

At this point, you should be asking yourself: Am I a data-entry drone or a marketer? But we already know the answer—you’re reading this blog, right? :)

In fact, this manual process is so tedious and time consuming that an agency I was working for once had to hire an intern whose main focus was just pulling this data and entering it into Excel spreadsheets. Poor kid.

Just typing out this process is making me tired, and we haven’t even gotten to adjusting your bids! So if you’re handling multiple clients, there’s just no possible way you have enough time in a day, or week, to make sure every client is getting their budget managed appropriately. Someone will always be left holding the short end of the bid stick.

Now that we’re all sufficiently freaked out, where do we go from here? What’s the better solution? How can we make sure we’re optimizing our bid strategy and managing our clients’ budgets effectively and still have enough time to develop strategy? 

How to Become a BBM Rockstar Using Acquisio

We've established that the status quo—aka, the daily data input time-suck—is not conducive to fostering innovation and helping our clients find new pathways to success. This is odd, especially in an industry that hinges on innovating, on being memorable, on igniting something.

Yet often, the only thing we end up igniting is our will to dive into another 10-key session.

Good news! The bidding and budgeting status quo has a kryptonite, and we've found it—Acquisio’s Bid & Budget Management solution. If you can't tell by now, I love it. In fact, at gyro, we bake its use into every new client agreement. 

So what's all the fuss about? For starters, the BBM algorithm has increased our clients' average monthly responses by 6% and decreased their cost per click by 23%, but wait till you hear what we were able to accomplish with mobile: 53% decrease in CPC and 144% increase in average monthly responses. Plus, it has more evenly allocated spend across campaigns and—here's the kicker—I can do it in my sleep. 

No, seriously. It works in my sleep. 

Once you're up and running, the platform automatically adjusts all your budgets and bids every 30 minutes, 24/7. To get there, though, you'll need to do a small bit of legwork. After you've created an account and taken the short training provided by Acquisio, you'll need to input monthly budgets and constraints based on the client goals. Be sure to think carefully here about how you want to approach structure and have similarly performing campaigns in the same budget group. Brand-term campaigns should be separated from non-brand campaigns, too.

If you make a misstep somewhere in this process, don't fret—you can always go back in and change the parameters if you're operating in self-serve mode. You can also reach out to Acquisio to work with an analyst if you have an uber-complicated client base. They have access to levers and knobs they can pull on the back end.

It's sort of like that secret Starbucks menu you've heard about but never had the guts to try. So many more possibilities! And, when you need to get to a higher level of granularity on certain accounts, the analysts deliver.

So that's what you GIVE—your client data and your account goals. Let's talk about what you GET.

• A user-friendly interface that's easy for you to learn. Don't worry, there's brief, self-paced training that helps you maximize your experience.
• A very simple client onboarding process. JavaScript, be gone. Acquisio's solution eliminates the time-consuming B2B barrier of clients having to put script on their sites.
• A reports interface for visualizing data and pulling insight. Graphs, tables, reports . . . oh my! You'll find something to satisfy every stakeholder.
• The gift of your own time back for strategizing and innovating. Get high level with your clients instead of being in the weeds all the time and potentially missing the forest for the trees. Can you spot the next trend? 

More Time to Think? Think Mobile

Too often we picture our fellow B2B'ers as cubicle-parked and desktop-facing. Times are a changing! Deals are struck off-hours. Decisions are made via mobile devices. When I heard Acquisio was getting on board with mobile analytics in late March 2015, I was pleasantly surprised. The move was decisively a good one, resulting in twice as many online responses from mobile as we were getting previously at less than half the cost. 

What do you think? What could you do with all that extra time you'd save if you let Acquisio's BBM tool handle your bids and budgeting? At this point, why wouldn't you?