September 24th’s edition of Monday Night Football between the Green Bay Packers and Seattle Seahawks proved to be the tipping point in labor negotiations between the NFL and their locked out referees. For the first three weeks of the season, the NFL had been using replacement referees to manage their games while trying to come to an agreement with the normal referees. While the replacement refs were able to manage the game enough to get by for the first couple of weeks, it all started to unravel during week three. Blown calls were made all throughout football Sunday, and culminated in infamous fashion during Sunday Night’s game when a miscall as time expired ended up costing Green Bay the game. While the replacement refs served their purpose and kept things in tact, things got out of hand and normalcy had to be restored to professional football.

How does this have anything to do with bidding rules? In the exciting world of pay per click management, automated bidding rules can be a savior to any search engine marketer managing a large account, as It’s simply impossible to successfully optimize the bids of thousands of keywords, or even more, on a daily basis. Bidding rules can keep your account in check and ensure you don’t have to keep an eye on it every hour of the day. However, if you let automated bidding rules replace you, your account can get out of whack. (See the analogy? Isn’t it clever?) Here are three tips to ensure that doesn’t happen.

1. Check in on your account several times a week and check your key performance indicators. Are your conversion numbers consistent?  Is traffic normal? Is cost per click in line with your account history? No matter what your goals are, it’s important to make sure your bidding rules are keeping them on track.
2. Don’t completely stop manually bidding. In large accounts, there are often very high volume keywords that can have a large on the overall performance of the account. It’s a good idea to keep an eye on these, and manually update bids if necessary.
3. Pause the rules if performance is dropping. In one account this author managed, volume numbers started dropping to a point where it was negatively impacting overall conversion numbers. To remedy the situation, the bidding rules were paused, and keyword bids were manually increased to quickly inject volume back into the account. After numbers were up, the rules were tweaked and re-launched, and the account was back to hitting great numbers.