we manage a fairly large adwords account (large by my standards) and I find it a struggle to manage the hundreds of adgroups we have across our campaigns while trtying to keep up with 'best practice' and have tightly focused adgroups with small volumes of high related keywords in each adgroup. I know some of you guys/gals have what I would call monsterous accounts with hundreds of thousands if not millions of keywords. My question is how do you do this in terms of keeping up with best practice account creation, testing, tracking etc? I am still using adwords editor and the web interface - so I guess the main answer is using different tool sets, but even so the overhead must be immense.
Golles, a difficult question to answer without simply saying 'it takes a lot of hard work'! However, my experience is that many campaigns are overloaded with keywords and phrases and possibly have too many concurrent ad groups/variations as well. At the end of the day, if your campaign structure is too large/unwieldy to manage effectively then either you need to employ more staff or simplify your campaign. Attempting to manage something that's out of your control will likely produce worse results than running something efficiently that's smaller and more manageable. I took over one account that had over 500 keywords in an ad group and more than 10 ad groups (still not enormous, I know, but it's a good example). I pared it down to 5 groups each with only 20-50 keywords and within two months their ROI had almost doubled. This wasn't due to any fantastic brilliance on my part but largely because they'd lost control of the campaigns and had countless 'poor' keywords costing a fortune and bringing poor leads. They were so focused on grabbing customers wherever they could - chasing keywords that were only marginally related to their products - that they forgot that it's the ones that convert that are important and the ones that covert with a +ve ROI that are most important. All the visitors in the world won't help if they all leave without buying. For sure, for certain sites/companies/products a wide selection of campaigns/groups/variations is going to be necessary but I do believe that the number of campaigns that are too heavy/complex outweighs the number that are underdeveloped.
I highly recommend you download the free AdWords Editor. http://www.google.com/adwordseditor It is a must have for managing a large account.
thanks, I am using adwords editor in addition to the web interface - sorry my post was not clear on that point
I find it best to build offline tools to manage and generate the files to upload in the offline adwords editor. If you're tracking conversion with your own code and track that data to a db as well as the click data you can see what's converting and adjust keyword bids based on conversion ratio's. Then daily, weekly or monthly just spit out a new bid sheet and upload it to the account.
Bear in mind that most of your keywords probably generate very little traffic - spend the majority of your time fine-tuning the ones that are costing the most money...