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Are Enterprise Bid Platforms Worth Your Investment?

By Tinuiti Team

Growing retailers may be considering Bid Management Platforms such as Kenshoo, Marin, DoubleClick and Efficient Frontier as a way to ease their management flow and integrate automation. Large scale bid management programs offer advertisers a variety of automation services but it does not necessarily mean every retailer is going to benefit.

What are the advantages of Enterprise Bid Platforms?marin-logo

Typically, retailers are managing campaigns across various inventories or networks like Google, Bing or Yahoo. These programs exist to allow advertisers to group all of their platforms together and filter their campaigns into one platform, avoiding the hassle of individual logins, manual bid adjustments and select optimizations to each campaign.

kenshoo-logo-lgWhen your managing thousands of keywords for thousands of products, across potentially hundreds of ad exchanges, enterprise bid platforms offer a variety of services to help consolidate and implement bid strategies and bid optimization practices.

Lewis Brannon, Paid Search Manager at CPC Strategy shares his advice for retailers considering enterprise management platforms:DoubleClick_logo1

“My experience is, yes – they do streamline. They allow you to have flexibility around bid strategies and automated bid solutions so you can input things that you want to happen. The platform will work on your behalf to try and reach those goals for you,” he said.

What are the Disadvantages to Enterprise Bid Platforms?

“I would say the negatives are that the bid strategies are not a guarantee. If you don’t have all of your input, 100 percent perfect, or if you make slight mistakes you can drive up cost and hurt your bottom line. They can be difficult to integrate, because your talking about more tracking pixels, more URL redirects.”

lewis-brannonHow do retailers know if they are suitable for an enterprise bid platform?

“These programs need data to survive. They’re data hogs. They have to eat data in order to work efficiently. If they get too little data, they get hypoglycemic. If you don’t give them the data they need, they get headaches, lethargic and they don’t work correctly,” Brannon said.

Retailer who are not suited to hit those thresholds with high levels of traffic, could cause the program’s algorithm to bug out and produce poor results.


Retailers with large product catalogs or significant investments in PPC channels know all too well that it’s difficult to stay cutting-edge with their channel management. And with so many products and concurrent campaigns, it becomes less feasible to dedicate the true product-level attention that each SKU deserves.

Knowing when it makes sense to introduce automation into channel management is critical to scaling growth on avenues like text, Shopping, display, and social advertising.

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