Automatic vs manual advertising on Bol: which works better and when?

It’s a question we hear regularly. Someone is running an automated campaign that performs well. They decide to switch to manual, because more control is better, right? But soon everything starts to go wrong. ACOS shoots up, traffic dries up, and they don’t know which levers to pull.

How can a campaign over which you have less control outperform a campaign you fully set up yourself?

The answer has less to do with automated versus manual, and more with how your manual campaigns are managed. Or rather: how they are overmanaged.

What exactly does an automated campaign on Bol do?

Before you can make the comparison, you need to understand what happens behind the scenes in an automated campaign.

An automated campaign on Bol does two things. First, it collects keywords and placements for your product. Bol itself looks for search terms that are relevant, adds them to your campaign, and starts testing. There are no limits. Everything Bol considers even somewhat relevant is included.

Second, it automatically adjusts bids based on your results. Based on CTR, impressions, and conversion rate, the algorithm estimates what a good bid is to stay within your set target ACOS. If keywords perform poorly, bids go down. If they perform well, they go up.

What you can set in an automated campaign is limited:

So you do give up some control. And yet it works better for many sellers than manual. That has everything to do with what goes wrong in manual management.

Why does manual go wrong so often?

With an automated campaign, people are relaxed. They let it run, trust the algorithm to do its job, and don’t interfere with every fluctuation. That mindset works in their favor.

With a manual campaign, the opposite happens. Once people have all the controls in their own hands, they start over-optimizing. They log in every day, see that €20 was spent yesterday without an order, panic, and adjust bids. The next day they do the same. And the day after that too.

The result is a campaign that is constantly changing, never gathers enough data to run stably, and continually reacts to noise instead of structural trends.

On top of that, many manual campaigns are filled with keywords that have not been validated. They were chosen based on intuition or search volume, but never tested on actual performance. An automated campaign does nothing but test and validate. That is exactly the foundation that is missing in manual campaigns when you start with them directly, without proper preparation.

When is automated good enough?

For a large share of sellers on Bol, automated campaigns are the better choice. That may sound surprising, but it’s simply the reality.

If you don’t actively know how to steer bids, if you don’t have time for structured campaign management, or if your assortment is too large to manage manually per product, then a well-configured automated campaign delivers better results than a manual campaign that is rearranged every day.

Automated is not perfect. There are clear limitations. But for many sellers, those limitations weigh less heavily than the damage caused by over-optimization in manual management.

When does manual really pay off?

Manual management pays off when you do it well. And then it delivers more than automated ever can. The control you get over bids per keyword, per placement type, and per product gives you possibilities an algorithm simply doesn’t have.

Specifically, manual pays off when you:

want to grow market share and scale more aggressively on specific keywords than an automated campaign allows. If you currently get 10% of impressions through automated, you can grow to 20% with manual and higher bids on proven keywords.

want to further optimize profit by using a different strategy for each keyword. Some keywords have a higher conversion rate and deserve a higher bid. Others are marginal and should be scaled back. An automated campaign doesn’t have that nuance.

want full control over where your budget goes. Want more budget on product pages and less on search results? With manual, you can set that exactly. With automated, you can’t.

The right approach: use both for their own purpose

Automated and manual do not exclude each other. The smartest strategy is to use both, each for a different purpose.

The keyword harvesting campaign

You start with an automated campaign as a keyword validator. That campaign tests which terms perform, at what CPC, and with what conversion result. The keywords that perform well you then move to a manual campaign. There you have full control over bids, can scale per keyword, and don’t have to keep paying to validate new, unknown terms.

The catch-all campaign

Alongside your manual campaigns, you let a continuous automated campaign run with an extremely low ACOS target of 1 to 4% and a corresponding low bid of around 10 cents. This campaign fills the gaps others leave behind. When competitors run out of budget or fail to cover certain time slots, you pick up cheap clicks on product pages. The traffic is not always the most relevant, but it is profitable and costs almost nothing.

Automatically adjusting bids in manual campaigns

The biggest disadvantage of manual management is that your bids constantly need attention. The solution is automation at the bidding level, not the campaign level. In Adyard, a bid optimizer algorithm automatically adjusts bids within your manual campaigns toward your desired ACOS target. Per keyword, per product, or per campaign.

That way, you combine the precision of manual with the efficiency of automated. You set the boundaries and the targets. The system does the work.

One thing you should never forget with automated campaigns

Whether you work automated or manual, one thing determines whether you are shown at all: your product title.

Bol only serves you on keywords that match the content of your listing. If the keyword you want to advertise on is not in your title, you won’t enter the auction. No matter how high you bid.

For automated campaigns, this is especially critical because you don’t choose keywords yourself. Bol determines which terms are relevant based on your title and category. A thin or poor title means you advertise on only a small part of the market without realizing it.

So always make sure your product is in the correct category and that the most important keywords are included in your title. That is the foundation everything rests on, for both automated and manual campaigns.

In summary: what do you choose when?

Automated or manual is not the right question. The right question is: am I using each type for the purpose it was made for?

Want to know which advertising strategy best suits your situation? Sign up for a free baseline assessment, and we’ll look together at your current approach and where the improvements are.