PinPoint Interactive Media announced recently that it will be changing its bid management system for search marketing from automated back to a manual system-- a move that breaks away from the industry standard. The agency believes that its manual bidding process yields better results than leading automated solutions and that strong return on investment is better achieved with manual oversight.

"Many marketers make the mistake of entrusting their search campaigns to software automation; but that's the easy way out," Adam Kaufman, president of PinPoint. "As with all marketing, search is all about promoting and protecting brands. At PinPoint, we've experienced better results with manual oversight because out staff lives and breathes our clients' brands every day. It's time for the market to re-inject human expertise into the process and recognize that search management is as much art as it is science."

Through experience, PinPoint discovered that human analysis yields a more nuanced understanding of factors impacting campaign performance such as the willingness to commit to a keyword through several creative cycles-- a critical process that automated calculation might pass on. Also, automated systems have been known to miss latent consumer response to search marketing.

Even though manual bidding might seem difficult for large-scale systems, PinPoint has determined that they can be just as scalable as most search marketers require with the right resource commitment, even for those bidding on thousands of keywords.