I guess nearing an almost dying state while working out goes along with keyword-level bidding! I’m quite surprised none of these pieces of advice relates to the new interface of adwords which dramatically speeds up optimizations such as keyword & site exclusion with integrated search query & placement reports. But maybe are you also waiting for Google’s official rollout for that particular topic

Anyway, you’ve made it to make me feel me guilty now. So i guess i’ll just have to go out running this afternoon. Damn.

@Jabna, I’ve been skeptical about only running my campaigns during specific days or times merely due to different time zones. I do realize a lot of people do their searches during the day and buy at night…at least that’s what I do ; )

I have found some success too with some campaigns only running on weeknights. I noticed co workers would shop online during the day but wait to purchase at night when they got home. If they pulled their credit card out while at their desk its pretty obvious they aren’t working.

First, once I establish where money is being spent and return is suspect, I would run a Search Query Report (3-6 months back) and export it to excel since this data can be overwhelming at first. When I run the report, I exclude all the unnecessary data like ad status, ad copy, destination URL, etc… I only want the keyword level stats. Then I use the data filter on excel to go to the Campaign level first, then ad group level so only the Search Queries in that particular ad group are showing. This makes the data much easier to consume and make decisions off of. Then simply start either adding good long-tail keywords or adding negatives that have high cost to them and are obviously bringing in the wrong type of traffic. I you have any doubt on the quality of a term, don’t touch it until you research the following. 1. run search on Google/Yahoo/MSN and see what types of ads are running. If they are offering the same product, traffic should be qualified you need to then look at your engagement metrics on GA or other Analytic platforms to see if it has a high bounce rate, low avg. page views, etc… you don’t want to kill a term that could be an “assist” term, which may not convert directly but leading to conversions for other terms. If the term has poor engagement, kill it until you can re-visit landing pages, ad copy. Could be you have the wrong landing page in place which is causing it not to convert.

Next, you should look over your ad copy performance. Another problem I feel most people tend to do is have a set it and forget it mind set to running ad copy testing. If you review your ad copy, you may see one of many problems that cost money with little return:

1. Ad has high CTR, low conversion rate- If you run your ads on Optimize, this is going to be the ad that gets the majority of your impression share since Google and Yahoo based ad performance on CTR.

2. Top Ad gets limited impression share- You may run your ads on Rotate Evenly, which is what you should do when testing out your ad copy. However, if you don’t go back to review the performance, you may find your best performing ad is only getting a small fraction of impression share. Sometimes its an obvious difference.

I hope this helps as well and as always, really enjoy reading the articles you guys provide.

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Thanks for the awesome PPC tips!