How many clicks per keyword would you use to consider it a good test of that words effectiveness?? Thanks in advance!
I recommend at least 100 clicks. With 100 clicks, it gives you a much better idea, of how effective your ads are. Try running 2-3 different ads at the same time, and have them running until they all have received 100 clicks, and then select the one that is performing best.
I don't agree with the 100 clicks but I strongly disagree with the waiting for them all to receive the X amount of clicks. What I do is set up 2 ads to be displayed 50/50. The test ends when one of them has hit the 20 click mark. If it's too even, I'll let it run up to 30 and so on. But waiting for ALL of them to hit the X click mark isn't a good idea IMO. You might have a dud ad which is very very poor. Waiting for that ad to reach a number of clicks could be time wasted. The one that reaches the 20-30 clicks first obviously has the better CTR but then the decision has to be made with regards to ROI/Conversions as well.
Clicks do not matter, roi does. Every industry and niche has different conversion ratios, so you can't say 100 clicks to figure it out, what if those 100 clicks cost your $5 per click and you only get paid $10 for a sale? There's a slight error in that thinking. When you focus on roi, you can figure out how much to spend per keyword instead of how many clicks per ad or keyword. So if something pays you $10 and you want 100% roi, you know you can spend $5 per keyword to figure out if that keyword is a good one or not. Number of clicks do not matter and the organic mindset of more is better in ppc has killed more accounts then anything else.
Of course clicks matter for testing purposes. If you are split testing 2 ads, you need to know how many clicks you will give them. When deciding which is the better ad, then the one with the most clicks will probably have the higher CTR, but it might also have a worse ROI. It's then up to the person running the account to decide which is the 'winner' and 'loser'.