Here are the things which I use to keep my Adwords campaigns in line. They have worked well over the last year as I have increased my company’s revenue ~10 fold and have been able to hold a consistent ROI over the course of that increase.

Things to always do:
1. Use a clearly defined heirarchical adgroup structure - This way you can have a higher ‘resolution’ of information detail - (The more the better).
2. Always use ad variation - At the very least use two different slight variations. The point is to test for the higher CTR.
- Try adding capital letters in the display url: www.AtomicCoffeeStore.com
- Add a call to action as the first word of your headline: Buy Fresh Roasted Beans
- Use keywords in the headline. This is a no-brainer, but if you haven’t noticed it already, each word in your copy that matches any of the keywords that people are searching for will show up bold to the user. This makes them more visible obviously.
3. Use all variations of keyword mathing types (broad, phrase & exact) - If you have 10 keywords broad matched, copy them and put quotes around them, now copy them again and put brackets arond them. You will end up increasing the size of each adgroup 3x but what happens is that Google tries out each keyword and once it determines that one set has a better return (CTR or Conv. Rate - IDK), it will disable the others. Ideally, we should be able to log in in about a month and quickly be able to see which keywords have been disabled because of this, but at this point, Google has a little square icon which you have to hover over to find out the status of a single keyword. I suppose you could run a report somehow though…
4. Test landing page variation - My company has three four of potential landing pages: the home page, a category home page, a search results page and a product page. I test between the product pages and the search results page and I find that the search results page returns a higher ROI. Maybe it’s because I can use the search results page to taylor an adgroup to my liking regardless of whether my company has set up a defined category/path to those specific types of products.
5. Include enough negative keywords - Use https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to find variations of the keyword that you’re considering bidding on, then take note of the words that show up which are not relevant to your product. The more thorough you are in adding negative keywords, the more refined your traffic is going to be and the higher you conversion rate will be.

To illustrate these points, consider the keyword: sports cards. To ensure that your ad is as visible is possible, again you create adgroups taylored to specific keywords. For instance, fot the keyword: sports cards - I’m going to have an adgroup called “sports cards” and the only keywords in the adgroup (in addition to about 100 negatives) will be: sports cards, “sports cards” & [sports cards], and my ad copy will most likely be a variation of: Buy Cheap Sports Cards, Buy Sports Cards Now, Want Sports Cards?, etc. I’m also going to want to make sure to include as many negative keywords as possible such as: pricelist, trade, video game, value of, worth, etc. In the end though I don’t think I’d bid onthe word ’sports cards’ because it’s just too expensive. Which leads me to another point:

6. Always bid in the tail - Picture a graph of keyword search frequency with keywords laid out across the bottom, left to right, generic to specific. You’re going to get a curved semi-L shaped line which basically illustrates that most searches are made using 1 or 2 words (more generic like: sports cards). Although most people search using 1 or 2 terms, most people are likely not ready to make a purchase. This is another way which you can refine the traffic you’re paying for. Picture a funnel, which illustrates the stage at which a person is in relation to purchasing an item (They teach you this in marketing 101 I think). The first stages include a broader range of people, basically everybody, because they’re in investigation mode, they keep their eyes open an take note of the products being advertised around them. As you move further down the funnel, you get less and less people, and what happens, is their searching behavior becomes more and more specific. This specific searching behavior encompases the ‘tail’ of the graph I mentioned earlier. It’s the sweet spot where CPC is lowest, customers are at their buying stage & conversion rates and CTR’s are at their highest. Now that I think about it, this technique maybe should be listed as number 1.

7. Don’t bid in the content network - I have to admit, I have not gotten this to work yet. I have tried a lot of different things and I am still searching to find someone who this option works for. Until I find out how to make it work, I cannot recommend it. All I can say is if you don’t know what you’re doing with it, don’t use it. It’s skews your true CTR since it’ll net you about 10,000 impressions in one day and only about 10 clicks (leaving you with a ~0.01% CTR), and those clicks just don’t convert. It’s so bad, I couldn’t even tell you if negative keywords work for the content network (I would imagine they don’t which is why you get a nasty amount of impressions), nor could I tell you which keywords are getting impressions. I suggest just staying away from it if you’re not an expert.

Things to do first:
1. Use more generic adgroups with a broader scope of keywords, after you have determined which keywords have the highest impression (assuming you want to keep them) take them out of the broad term adgroup, and create a new adgroup with ad copy specific to that keyword.

If you don’t have a little bit of a padded budget for PPC advertising, I would suggest spending your money on some books instead of on making mistakes. Also, read online and as you learn more, search for specific questions and see what is working for everyone else. That’s what I do.