Search Engine Land, you make me laugh… Are Acquisio smiling?

So I’m at Search Engine Land today catching up on my daily dose of search news, and I see an article in the ‘Paid Search’ Column (A topic close to my heart) by  Nick Abramovic titled ‘Automated Keyword Bidding? More Like Automated Money Sink‘ (read article here if you’re interested) and it brought a smile to my face to say the least!

If you can’t be bothered reading the post just yet, here’s Nick’s intro:

Search Engine Marketing agencies scale not by creativity or innovation but by overhead. This is a fact that many agencies deny but is the cold hard truth. This is true even for agencies that have developed in-house technology or license technology from others.  Even the “advanced” agencies are not very sophisticated – they will use rules-based bidding that works half the time because they still require humans to double-check if they actually care about their client’s bottom-line.

With these bidding systems being rules-based, they require account managers to make customizations (I believe the term is “settings update” after hearing a recent sales pitch) depending on the account/campaign.

So why did this article bring a smile to my face? Well firstly – Nick, solid post and some good points around the pitfalls of bid management. It certainly pays to be aware of this if and when you use various automation tools.

And while you may have generalized a bit to much. I think you’ve got your point across well…

I laughed because of this… Tell me, what’s wrong with this picture?

Check out the Sponsor Link, it’s Acquisio! These guys build PPC Bid Management Software for agencies, probably the very same agencies that Nick’s having a go at.  GOLD!

Ah…  still laughing….

Look I’m sure it was a harmless mistake, as Acquisio are a ‘Column Sponsor’ and therefore just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but this is just too funny.

I’m’ sure Acquisio are laughing too. (not!)

Thanks for brightening up my day search engine land, much appreciated.