The Process Analysis:

The Product of Automatic Bidding Assistant

1. Introduction:

The newly conceptualized product -- Automatic Bidding Assistant is a comprehensive online product which helps business owners spend their online advertising budget intelligently by providing a wide range of services in targeting their customers accurately, bidding for every keyword or advertising space efficiently, comparing advertising thoughts under a certain advertising campaign reliably, etc. All these exciting functions are realized through well-designed algorithms and thoroughly understood statistics based on solid research in modern data science.

The development process of the new product can be divided into four phases:

  Background or Knowledge Accumulation — discovering a problem and making attempts to solve it;

  Incubation Process – allowing the subconscious mind to mull over the information gathered;

  Idea Experience – Using creative thinking tools to generate ideas;

  Evaluation and Implementation – Evaluating different ideas, choosing the most suitable one and implementing it.

The detailed experiences in each phase are documented and analyzed for future references.

2. Discussion:

In the discussion section, the above-mentioned four phases (Frederick, O’Connor & Kuratko, 2013) are described one by one.

2.1 Phase 1: Background or Knowledge Accumulation.

In the new era, information technologies are changing the world dramatically. Search engine is becoming an indispensible part of people’s life now. People use search engine to learn definitions of new words they encounter, to locate local five-star restaurants, to find the shortest route between two spots, etc. And social media has changed the way that people communicate and share knowledge.

Through search engine, people can search products or services they want to purchase and compare the results. Search engine companies including Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. and search engine bars provided by Amazon and Ebay can take advantage of the huge amount of users and provide a platform for the businesses to compete for the rankings of their related products and also limited advertising spaces (Cherman, 2007). And social media also has limited advertising spaces for those businesses to compete for. What’s more, social media users may share opinions about the products with their friends online, which is a very effective and attractive way of advertising for businesses (Smith, 2012). 

With search engine and social media becoming more and more important channels that businesses persuade their customers, budget for internet marketing is dominating more and more of a company’s total shares of marketing budget. The search engine and social media charge fees by clicks or by thousands of impressions or other ways, which can be very expensive and sometimes a waste of money if the business owners do not take time to research the new advertising methods. So, large companies hire costly Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies to do the job. But small companies cannot afford the cost to promote their products in this way, which makes them at a disadvantageous position in the new business environment. Through interviews with some friends whose startups went out of business because of this reason, an affordable and effective automatic bidding system is warmly welcomed by them. Actually, not only is an automatic bidding system for small businesses, but also is for big companies or even professional marketing firms. Those professional SEM and SEO companies have to hire more and more labors if their number of clients is increasing and there are hundreds of thousands of keywords in the pool to keep an eye on. It means, under such condition, the labor cost is increasing enormously and consequently the profit is low for those marketing firms.