It's one thing to plunk down $50 a day for a few keywords if you have a small business or simply want to test out paid search. It's another thing entirely to manage your bids on a sizeable paid search campaign manually over a period of time.

A competitor of one of our clients once confessed that we were driving his team of on-site search specialists positively bonkers. The team would update its bids, hoping to "jam" my client by underbidding us by a penny, thus increasing our click costs. Mere minutes later, we would counter-jam his team, forcing them to go back and re-bid everything. What the competitor didn't realize at the time was that he was bidding against a system, not human beings, and that our bidding strategy was based on a collection of logic rules-- some simple, some complex.

A good bid management system (Atlas Search, 24/7 Search, DART Search, et cetera) pays for itself almost immediately by increasing your bang for the buck and keeping your paid search costs down. You'll also become a lot more efficient through cutting back on the manpower that you've allocated to managing your search campaign.

Given all this, I'm flabbergasted when I continue to run into advertisers who insist on managing bids manually. All it takes is a single competitor's employment of a decent bid management and search tracking solution and any manual management you might be doing will be rendered completely ineffective for terms you compete on. Much like a martial artist uses jiu jitsu techniques to apply your own energies against you, a competitor will use a bid management system to increase your click costs, take all the good inventory for themselves, and blow you out of the water from an efficiency standpoint.

Investing more than $1,000 a month in paid search? Don't do it manually.