Generally the mistakes people make in managing their AdWords campaigns are the same ones made by most advertisers. Improvements can be made with under an hours work. This can save you hundreds and probably thousands of dollars with less than 60 minutes work following the advice given in this article. Can you guess the biggest mistake made by advertisers on Google AdWords campaigns? That would be Campaigns that are not properly organized. Ads and keywords that are not organized will damage your campaigns and end up costing you big money. With campaigns put together in the proper way will have good results from the start. At that point optimizing them and making adjustments is a simple task. As time goes on this can make a big difference. In a perfect world, you'd serve up a perfect ad for every single keyword someone types in. Since each keyword is different, each ad would be different, too. If you had 2,000 keywords, then you'd have to write 2,000 ads, too. However we don't live in an optimum world. We can get a good result by clustering keywords that are alike with an appropriate ad. An ad campaign is the file cabinet that holds all your ad groups, it's topic is general. An ad group is the smallest unit that has keywords and ads in it. Your ad campaign should always have more than one adgroup. In Google your account can contain as many campaigns as you need. You can have campaigns in your account with totally different topics. The products you sell may be absolutely unrelated and the websites you send traffic to may be different. The way you divide up your campaigns is your choice, but the in which you divide up your ad groups is not. There is the right way and the wrong way to do it. A novice creating their campaign might put it together in this manner: Smith's Telecommunications Robust Solutions for Your Every Voice Mail Need www.smithstelecom.com So goes their ad, and then their keywords looking something like this: auto attendant business telephone systems call management systems voice mail voice mail equipment voice mail service voice mail systems When the prospective clients click, they are all directed to the same homepage. This page has a variety of links to pages with titles from Contact Us to Equipment. What is the problem with this type of AdWords management? Number one is the variety in the keyword list is too wide. Each of those words should be put into its own adgroup adding in a shortlist of similar keywords/phrases. The ad doesn't match the keywords, and it can't, because there are too many different kinds of keywords in the group. Putting your business name in the headline is a major mistake for nearly every business including Smith Telecommunications. This will make your click through rate really low and therefore you will have a very high bid price. The ad is about Smith Telecommunications, not what the customer really wants. Your ads need to be about your customer, not about yourself! When searching for 'voice mail service' a person wants to go to a page whose topic is voice mail service. Likewise someone looking for equipment will want one on voice mail equipment not voice mail services. By making someone scour your page for the information they want you are making them work too hard and they may leave before they find what they are looking for. By creating a specific layout of your keywords and adgroups initially, you will be able to make these adjustments more easily. Using www.wordtracker.info or http://inventory.overture.com, categorize your keywords into neat and closely related adgroups. Something like this: Voice Mail Services (adgroup) voice mail provider voice mail service voice mail service provider voice mail services Voice Mail System (adgroup) voice mail systems voice mail systems for realtors telemarketing and voice mail systems phone systems voice mail home office voice mail systems home office telephone voice mail systems Auto Attendant (adgroup) answering attendant auto system auto attendant voice mail services auto attendant auto attendant phone system auto attendant software auto attendant system auto attendant voice mail phone auto attendant There's another step we need to take before pasting this into a campaign: Consider negative keywords. Here's a list of keywords that come from "Voice Mail Software." voice mail software voice mail business software voice mail software for panasonic voice mail broadcasting software voice mail business software multiple voice mail software mac voice mail software multi-line voice mail system software vru norstar voice mail software software to record voice mail free voice mail software You really aren't wanting to have visitors looking for free stuff. You also don't have anything to do with voice broadcasting or even Macintosh computers. This is a good start on your negative keyword list. You do this by putting a minus sign in front of each of the words on your negative keyword list. This is how your list will now look: voice mail software voice mail business software voice mail software for panasonic voice mail business software multiple voice mail software multi-line voice mail system software vru norstar voice mail software software to record voice mail Negative Keywords: free mac macintosh broadcast broadcasting So when you set up your ad campaigns, each one of these keyword lists is going to go into a different group with its own set of ads.
I agree to most of your post, which although seems obvious to me, may well not seem obvious to others. One thing you say: However we don't live in an optimum world. We can get a good result by clustering keywords that are alike with an appropriate ad. On top of that I only support keyword clustering if the keywords get minimal/next to no impressions at all - if they get a decent amount of impressions, they need their own ad group - no doubt about it. In one of your examples: Voice Mail Services (adgroup) voice mail provider voice mail service voice mail service provider voice mail services ... if say voice mail service gets a lot of impressions, then it should be placed in it's own ad group with only that keyword in it. 2 ads are produced (split tested) for that single adgroup and it goes from there. A keyword should not be clustered if it's getting enough impressions. Of course this is only my view.
Thanks for the post. Good explanation and examples for those of us who are new to adwords. It all seems to make sense, but I am sure I would not have intuitively done things that way my first few times. Great example.
I'd just like to mention here that http://inventory.overture.com/ no longer exists (ever since overture was taken over by yahoo)... Btw, do you own the internetbee by any chance?
Actually, segregating high volume keywords is the best way to go and then cluster the remaining. Another mistake many advertisers do is spend countless in unproductive areas of campaign management. Instead of trying to optimize all 2,000 keywords, extract the keywords that generate over 80% of your click volume and only go 1 to 1 on those. This way, most of your time is spent on the keywords giving you traffic and sales. Then you can just generalize, or apply testing results of the high performers to the remaining 20%. In my experience, if you had 2k keywords I would guess that 10 or 20 of them are driving over 80% of the click volume, and probably no more than 100 keywords.
If I have keywords that I feel are getting enough impressions to produce conversions, I have them in their own adgroup. I then have some ad groups that I check weekly (as above - probably the ones that are driving 80% of my traffic) ... ones that are getting fewer impressions I have notes to check them every 2-3 weeks ... others I check every 4 weeks which are mainly keywords that get very few impressions and are clustered. If I check an adgroup 4 weeks later and it's not had enough clicks, impressions I'll make a note to check it again in 4 weeks or sometimes even longer. At the end of the day, I'm then spending most of my time checking and tweaking the adgroups that get the most traffic. The rest I look in on now and then.