What was your experience with SEM Management Tools (like Marin Software, Kenshoo, AdCore, Acquisio, etc)?

First of all, finding keywords that are relevant to your products or services is the first step in an SEO effort. If the words are not under high demand for advertisements, the keywords can be more cost effective as long as there is still sufficient search volume. In other words, you want to make sure they keywords are something people use. The next step is a solid content strategy to employ the keywords in a natural way. I find the SEO Table at search engine land to be the best guide. You can find it at http://searchengineland.com/seotable. The key is to use the good practices, such as incorporating words in your articles and posts as well as URLs, and capitalizing on external sources, such as Social Media. At the same time, you artificially loading up on keyboards.

I think this is a great thing. As with any industry, sometimes something major needs to happen to weed out the riff-raff. Keywords should not be the focus, and for real agencies they haven't been for a while now. While SEOs used to promote 'more traffic to your website', what they really should have been doing is promoting 'more TARGETED traffic to your website'. Look, anyone can get traffic, but targeted traffic takes work. And that's the traffic that turns into conversions. Agencies that are focusing on keywords aren't serving their clients' end goal - more revenue. Want more revenue and less crappy traffic? Give me a shout.

Here is how I'd suggest you learn SEM: #1 - Open a Google Adwords Account (You can search for free credit / promo codes) online and play around with it. #2 - Review all of Google's training material: https://support.google.com/adwords/?hl=en&page=examstudy.cs#topic=3119071 #3 - When you finish Google's training materials, then read about Adwords on the web. Here is one good resource and you can Google for more: http://www.wordstream.com/adwords-for-dummies #4 - Sign up for an affiliate network (e.g. Commission Junction or Linkshare) and use your free credit to promote another company's offer. #5 - Once you feel comfortable with Adwords, consider building out your own Lead Gen websites or selling leads to existing affiliate networks (e.g. Motive Interactive or Integrate.com) #6 - If you'd like to learn from someone else, find an entry-level job at an agency: http://www.indeed.com/q-PPC-entry-level-jobs.html #7 - Another good way to get good at PPC if you work in an in-house marketing role is to hire someone to audit or manage your own account for a period of time so you can learn how they think and what they do. #8 - One word of caution: Google takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. Their default settings make it very easy to waste a lot of money so really make sure you know what you are doing before you spend too much money.

Technically you can bid on competitors. Take for example Autotrader who bids for keywords such as Honda, Ford, etc. But the best advice is actually here http://searchengineland.com/the-complete-guide-to-bidding-on-competitor-brand-names-trademarked-terms-118576

I know you've already decided to use a bid management platform. However, I'd like to share with you my experiences. As an SEM agency managing $30 million+/year, we've invested tens of thousands of dollars into streamlining our work effort with a bid management platform. We've specifically used Marin & Click Equations (now owned by Acquisio). We also consistently demo the bid management platforms to see if there's anything eye opening for us. 1) We've always had an implementation challenge. Installing each one across multiple clients has been a pain. If you're just running it for your company - then it's a lot better. 2) Crappy Bid Algorithm's - they always (used to) try to pitch you on how sexy their bid management algorithms are. We had a client who came to us already on Marin, and we found that their bid algorithm consistently sucked. Honestly, bid management isn't rocket science, and once you have an equilibrium, it doesn't need to be changed much. 3) Google doesn't consistently update their API - many of the beta features that power users use aren't available via the API immediately, so the bid management platforms can't take that data in. We liked Click Equations years ago, because they were the only platform at the time that imported Quality score, and created alerts and reporting for you, even though it wasn't avaiable via API. These days, things like the Google Business Data center, Adwords Scripts & Labels etc. aren't available via the standard API, and therefore none of the platforms deal with it. 4) These platforms are ONLY good for reporting - I sat at a Google roundtable of 10 top SMB SEM agencies ($25 - $100 million/year in managed spend), and I asked them "do any of you use Bid Management platforms?". Only ONE of the ten said they use a bid management platform, and at that, only for reporting. 5) The real things Bid Management solutions should be doing - The real thing that bid management platforms should be focusing is automating the things that count (e.g. split testing ads), and they don't. You can however, find other vendors (e.g. Brad Geddes's Adalysis.com) that do ad testing in an effective manner. If you have further questions, please feel free to give me a ring.