Tweaking / managing Adwords Campaigns

Hi all

This might seem like a very basic question to some of you but it is something that I have never seen addressed properly on any forums or in any text books (and I have read a few). My Question relates to how people go about tweaking and managing adwords campaigns once they are up and running. I often get myself totally confused when I look at pages full of figures showing impressions, CPC, clicks, position and CTRs. Partly, I assume, this has something to do with a slight numerical dyslexia I suffer from, but I also have never been told where to really start. So, can anyone outline how they approach this - as systematically as possible please. When looking at results I need to know:

• How do I judge which keywords / adGroups are really performing well (CTR?, CPC?, Conversions)
• How do I know what groups or individual keywords need or warrant tweaking (maybe I could increase the MAX CPC for an individual keyword that is showing a large number of impressions but has a low average position and thus a low CTR?)
• Is there a rule of thumb we should be following?

I have attached a small example AdGroup. I have numbered a few keywords 1 - 4. To me, these look like keywords that might need some attention. Am I right? What would you do with these results?

I apologise for the broad nature of this question and also for the length! If anyone would be kind enough to respond I'm sure many others would also find a response very useful.

Many thanks


PSie

The very first question I would ask is how are you judging your conversions. I notice you don't use their code (not 100% accurate by any means), so are you checking this on your side?

You can have a huge clickthrough rate but if you have no conversions then that can mean a bad ad.

or

You can have a small clickthrough rate but high conversion which can mean bad keywords.

My biggest tool when analyzing adwords is Conversion. Without that all the other stats are meaningless.

Thanks for the speedy response Jason. Yes, I forgot to mention that this campaign is not being tracked for conversion yet! "WHAT!", I hear you all shout. I know..I know and I will be adding conversion tracking code asap. I realise the importance of this but ignoring that for the time being you must make mods to your campaigns based on the other data too. As you said yourself Jason, conversion data using adwords tracking, is not that accurate and obviously won't tell me anything about customers who convert at a much later date after visiting initially via one of my ads, and also about repeat purchases (upsales / cross-sales).



I didn't want to get too bogged down with conversion data at this point really. Can we do anything useful without it though?

PSie

I can't really give anything too useful I don't think without seeing how specific your ads are.

Take this example:

You create an ad for the keyword "sneakers"

The ad says

Free pair of sneakers to every visitor.

You get 2,000 impressions - 1,200 clicks and 0 sales because you arent actually giving away a free pair but instead have a deal for every visitor that comes to the site and buys a pair.

Are you happy to pay out for that advertising?

I used an extreme on purpose to illustrate a point. The way Adwords is successfull depends on how targeted your ads are.

I write very specific ads for each small group of keywords and deliver them to the product. Because my ads are so specific my CTR's are lower but my conversions are great. This means cheaper advertising for me. If I didn't know that conversion rate, I may be tempted to discontinue that keyword.

What you are asking for is what a good CTR is, when in fact a CTR can be TOO HIGH also. If you had a CTR of 50% but a conversion rate of .1%, I would dump that keyword or rewrite the ad for it.

Sorry if this wasn't the direct answer you were looking for.

Thanks again. Did you see the screen dump I attached with my initial post though? I am only looking at One adGroup in this example. The copy is perfectly clear for the adtext (it is for a service and not a product by the way). Would you do anything with the keyowrd I have numbered "4"?

Cheers

I hate to give advice without knowing specifics and the best advice would really be as Egol says "experiment"

But since you really are looking for a quick answer:

#1. You only have 150 impressions, I'm not sure if that is even enough to judge
#2. This ad is displayed 7th. Thats not exactly the best position for click throughs

Maybe that gets you into the right direction of experimentation?