Companies these days like to tout the technology underlying their PPC management strategy. From automated bid management vendors to search agencies to the engines themselves, it seems like everyone claims to have an application that will work magic for your paid search campaigns.

Automated bidding technology is among the most useful tools in the PPC toolbox—allowing companies to scale to tens of thousands of keywords, thousands of ads and millions in media spend. However, it’s important to remember that bid management is only one piece of your optimization strategy. Implementing best-in-class architecture and defining overall online marketing goals prior to ever turning on a tool is essential to a well-executed marketing campaign. Ad copy and landing page optimization are also critical components to paid search optimization; bid management strategies and tools will only get you so far.

Consider an extreme example. Let’s say you sell cell phones and accessories, and you run the keyword “nokia phone charger” with ad copy that reads:

Most likely, this ad is not going to sell a lot of phone chargers. First, it’s advertising the wrong product—phones, not chargers—and it also mentions a price point of $100, which is more than most people will be willing to spend on a charger.

Automated bid tools would likely see this poor performance and lower the bid until the keyword hit the target CPA or ROI. But the problem here isn’t that the bid is wrong; instead, it’s bad ad copy, which the bidding tool doesn’t even comprehend. Therefore, instead of bringing in a thousand $20 sales per day, this keyword drives two $120 phone sales, and your bidding tool thinks it’s doing just fine.

It’s crucial to understand your customers’ intent, especially in paid search.

That’s why it’s crucial to understand your customers’ intent, especially in paid search. Keyword Intelligence is vital in achieving this: it provides the link to your customers, helping you create offers that resonate with them.

Moreover, smart technology is only as smart as the person managing it. Relying solely on technology – and not your internal team or agency – is flawed. Similarly, it’s in the planning and ability to quickly adapt all aspects of online campaigns – including bid management – that determines success. Humans understand goals and can learn based on user intent, which can and does affect language and bidding.

Ultimately, no software algorithm (not even almighty Google) can truly understand relevance as well as a human does. Of course, trying to determine relevance can be a time-consuming process when you have tens of thousands of keywords or ad copy creatives. Therefore, it’s a good idea to work towards discovering ways of streamlining your entire insight-gathering process, even beyond initial bid management. Identifying big win opportunities through a more efficient process can go way beyond what a bid management tool can do.

In paid search, there are (at least!) four different “levers” you can use to optimize campaigns: keywords, bids, ad copy and landing pages. If you’re not adjusting all of them, you’re missing opportunities without even knowing it. But while tools can help with keywords and ad copy, success ultimately requires smart humans who monitor, test and strategize.

So how are smart humans supposed to keep up with a campaign spending a million bucks a month, with a bidding tool making 10,000 bid changes every day? The key is effective campaign architecture. In a well-organized campaign, it’s easy to see what’s working and what’s not; you can quickly run tests, swap out ads and build out new sets of keywords.

Good architecture is especially easy to overlook when using bid tools, because if you’re just dumping keywords into buckets and setting bid rules, you might not think much about the account structure. Once you realize that there’s more to PPC than just coming up with a keyword list and watching the money roll in, though, you can begin to appreciate how important good planning is to great results.

David Sprinkle is the Director of Analytics and Insight at Acronym Media.