What's the best resource for learning SEM/PPC bid/budget management of 100,000 to 1,000,000 keyword AdWords accounts?

Being a Google Partner has many benefits, but they revise them all the time. Google seems to protect their intellectual property heavy, so as a partner, you can display their partnership logo to your potential clients. Also, when they roll out new products in beta, you know before the public does. As Google products go, that's a huge benefit. They provide enhanced support when you need it as well. I also do a lot of public speaking, so the one benefit public speakers enjoy is that they let you speak at their events; a very valuable benefit to us public speakers ;) I hope this answers the question. Bruce

I've done a lot of complex analytics installations, usually cross-domain and including AdWords and manual tagging with conversion tracking of ecommerce transactions. The gclid by default will override the manual UTM values in Analytics so that is what you are looking for. If you are just grabbing the manual tags from the URL for your own purpose, this should be OK. However, if you at some point want to import conversions (say) connected to your manual tag, then you would want to enable UTM overriding the gclid: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033981?hl=en. Do you have AdWords and Analytics accounts linked? Where and how are you tracking commerce conversions, if you are? Do you feel you are getting the insights you need from your current custom reporting? Let me know if I can help with a call about those or further optimization of your analytics capture. Best - Michael

Depending upon what aspect of AdWords you want to automate, you can look at various tools. As Megumi suggested, Marin is a good option for bid management. You can have a look at Optmyzr (optmyzr.com) to automate account management activities. Cyfe is another option to automate reporting and building dashboards.

It all depends on whether they are all selling the same thing to the same persona. If yes, then combine all the campaigns into one adwords account, which feeds into one analytics account. That way they can get feedback on the effectiveness of different keywords, ads, etc. more quickly (because there will be more data, from all the different websites, all in one place, for a particular keyword). If they are each selling different things, or to different personas, then don't combine their accounts, because it will just make things confusing and not useful from an analysis perspective.

I can discuss having done indepth research before we select Marin software