Automatic strategies or manual betting management

There are two main approaches to bid management - manual and automatic. Both strategies have their advantages and disadvantages and should be applied not according to the "fashionable/unfashionable" principle, but taking into account the specifics of the business.

In this article, we will look at the difference between manual and automatic strategies and which one to choose.

How to choose a strategy

In order not to make a mistake with your choice, you need to clearly understand what tasks the advertising agency faces.

These could be:

• traffic of visitors to your site;
• sales growth, leads;
• marketing promotion of goods.

Next, you need to figure out what budget size the advertising campaign is designed for: you need to determine the budget for the week and month. You can change the strategy settings on the campaign settings page.

Manual strategies are suitable for advertisers who have a clear understanding of the goals of the advertising campaign. When you have a good understanding of your target audience, their behavior, needs and preferences, you can use this knowledge to more effectively adjust the bid and targeting, which automatic systems may not always take into account.

Automatic ones are chosen by those advertisers who rely on the infallibility of mathematical algorithms that can, based on the specified parameters, offer the optimal use of the budget and the achievement of the advertising campaign goals. Auto strategies are also suitable if you do not have the capabilities and resources for manual control.

When choosing an automatic strategy, you trust the system to manage bids and impressions. You decide what result you want to achieve and set a spending limit. Yandex.Direct provides different automatic placement settings for different advertiser tasks. Choosing the right strategy increases the effectiveness of the campaign.

Manual bid management

This type of strategy is more useful at the initial stage. When you first set up contextual advertising and do not yet know how much clicks, conversions cost and at what time your target audience is active, you need to test different options and just collect data for a couple of weeks. And then you can safely "hand over" statistics to automatic strategies and watch how the robot achieves the necessary indicators on its own.

Manual setup does not mean that all the numbers will have to be pulled out of thin air. Direct will analyze the semantics of competitors and offer recommended rates. You can rely on these recommendations, but the decision will still be yours.

Advantages of manual control

• Full control - the specialist has full control over the process and can make changes at any time.
• Deep analysis - allows you to conduct a deeper analysis of data and make informed decisions.
• Suitable for complex campaigns - Manual management is more suitable for complex campaigns with unique requirements.
• No need to wait for statistics to accumulate - set the rates, wait a couple of days and check how well everything works, adjust. Automatic strategies "learn" for several weeks, during which time their efficiency is often lower.
• Full budget control - you set your own rates for specific phrases and can adjust them at any time.
• You can make changes at any time. In automatic strategies, all global changes, such as geotargeting or time targeting, will lead to a restart of the training. This means you will have to adjust the goals, budget and wait a few more weeks until the algorithm starts to produce optimal results.
• Adjusting rates by time: you can set increasing and decreasing coefficients for different hours of the day. For example, your rate is 20 rubles. But you know that from 18:00 to 21:00 there are the most potential clients online. Therefore, you increase the rate by 50% and during the hottest hours it grows to 30 rubles.

Disadvantages of manual control

• Time consuming. Manual control requires a significant investment of time and effort.
• Human factor. There is a risk of errors and insufficiently objective assessment of the situation.
• Doesn't allow maximizing efficiency in large campaigns. Manual management is difficult to scale.
• You can't change your rates too often. Automatic strategies take into account many factors and can change rates every 15 minutes. And manual rate changes are applied no more often than once every 30 minutes. That is, updating rates as often as the automatic strategy does is simply pointless - Yandex may not react to changes immediately.

Automatic strategies

They are based on mathematical algorithms. By analyzing statistics, they estimate the probability of a target transition and target action on the site. Forecasting is performed based on the analysis of keywords for the ad, determining the frequency of their input into the search.

To forecast conversion, the behavior of site users who entered a search query and clicked on an ad is analyzed. The Direct system receives statistical data by using the Yandex.Metrica counter, which must be installed on the site. If the volume of statistics is insufficient to form a reliable forecast, the system takes into account previous information: the analogy base and data on clicks from Yandex search.

Principles of operation of algorithms

The algorithm determines the dependence of clicks, transitions and other actions on time parameters. Advertising parameters are configured in real time, taking into account all the details. Statistics updates in the automatic strategies cabinet occur every 15 minutes, i.e. adjustments are performed faster than with manual bid management.

When using automatic strategies, there is a risk of overspending the advertising budget. The algorithms provide a certain protection for the advertiser from unjustified spending. By default, you cannot spend more than 35% of the weekly limit per day. The maximum bet is 10% of the weekly budget. When limiting the advertising campaign with time parameters, the budget is evenly distributed over working days.

Advantages of automated strategies

• It is enough to specify the target indicators (budget, cost of conversion or clicks) to the system and it will do everything itself. If in a manual strategy you need to test rates to achieve the desired KPI, then when working with automatic strategies, you can simply specify the target values, and the system itself will bring conversions at the desired cost. All the points where manual strategies reveal their weaknesses are the strengths of automatic ones. They save time, quickly respond to any changes in the competitive situation and predict in advance which key phrases will work best.
• Frequent bid updates. The same rapid response to auction changes as with an automated strategy cannot be achieved by manually managing bids.
• Do not require constant analysis. The system changes rates based on the competitive situation, time of day and specified target indicators.
• The system itself will decide which phrases will lead to conversion. In manual strategies, to identify the strongest and weakest phrases, you need to test different amounts of traffic and accumulate enough statistics for analysis. Automatic strategies take into account many factors at once and can predict which phrase will “shoot” better. Moreover, strategies aimed at conversion optimization are focused on bringing in precisely converting visitors.
• Efficiency: In most cases, automated strategies show higher efficiency compared to manual management, especially for large campaigns.
• Time saving. Automation frees up the specialist's time, allowing him to focus on other tasks.
• Constant optimization. The system constantly analyzes data and automatically adjusts rates to achieve the set goals.

Disadvantages of automated strategies

• Not always suitable for everyone. Some niche campaigns may require more fine-tuning that an automated system cannot always provide.
• Black box. It is not always clear what algorithms the system uses to make decisions, which can cause mistrust.
• Risk of budget overruns. If set up incorrectly, the automatic system can lead to budget overruns.
• You can't make frequent changes to the campaign. With any major changes, for example, in the volume of semantics, in geotargeting or time targeting, the strategy will not be able to quickly respond to them and make correct forecasts. Therefore, it will start learning again.
• The automation works according to the calendar week. Yandex's week will always end on Sunday. The system will not be able to distribute the budget, for example, from Thursday to Thursday. If you make changes on Thursday, Yandex will spend the budget that you planned to spread over the week in three days: Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Therefore, if you still need to make changes to the campaign, it is better to do it on Mondays.

So what to choose: manual strategies or automatic ones?

As we have already said above, there are no good and bad strategies. There are those that suit you better. Most often, this decision depends on the individual characteristics of the business, but there are several general recommendations.

Manual strategy management is suitable for:

• For young businesses that are just starting to run campaigns in Yandex.Direct and have not yet accumulated statistics.
• For those who run a small advertising campaign with a small volume of semantics and traffic. If your campaign gets less than 100 clicks per week, automatic strategies will not have enough data for analysis.
• For advertisers who frequently make changes to their advertising campaign:
   - regularly hold promotions and need to urgently increase rates;
   - constantly change their product range and expand their semantics
• For those who experience periodic site failures. In this case, automatic strategies are restarted and begin to learn again.
• For advertisers who have a very limited budget and may need to urgently turn off advertising without losing statistics.

Automatic strategy management is suitable for:

• For those who do not want to independently test rates and spend time on a detailed analysis of the campaign's effectiveness.
• For an advertiser who knows his KPIs: average cost per click, conversion or ROI.
• For those who run campaigns with a large volume of semantics and cannot track all bids manually.

In most cases, especially for large campaigns, automatic strategies can significantly simplify the process of managing advertising campaigns and show higher efficiency than manual management. However, it is necessary to set up goals correctly, monitor results and be ready to adjust settings depending on the results. 
But knowledge of the principles of manual bid management is also useful even when using automatic strategies, as it helps to better understand the logic of the system and make more informed decisions. Often, the best option is a combined approach, where automatic strategies are used as a basis, and manual management is used to fine-tune individual ads or groups.

May your advertising campaigns be effective!