Here’s a quick brain dump of some of my Advanced Adwords Tips.
I’ll be writing a separate post for each to flesh them out in detail.
I hope they help!

1. Fail Fast – One out of every ten business ideas succeeds.  The trick to having more success then is to try more ideas.  Which means you need to fail the ones that aren’t working quickly so that you can find something that works.
2. Always Be Testing – Believe no-one, even your own previous theories.  What worked for someone else may or may not work for you.  It could be that you implemented it differently from how they did, or that the market is different, or that the vertical is different.  It could even be that Google’s algorithm has changed so what worked previously may not work for you again.
3. Build The Perfect Search Campaign – This consists of exact match keywords.  Exact match keywords are what people typed into the line in the search engine (unless it is a search partner, which may use a different search query than the user typed in).  Phrase and broad keywords are sets of search terms that people type into the line.  The stats for phrase and broad keywords are therefore averages of lots of different search terms.  To get maximum visibility, use exact match.  To get more exact match keywords to add to your account, perform keyword research, or use the search query report and look at what search terms people used when your phrase and broad keywords were triggered.
4. Impression Share is Key – If everything else stays the same and you double your impression share, then you have doubled your traffic and hopefully your revenues and profit too.  The best bit is that your impression share typically increases if you increase your CTR (without increasing your bid prices), and/or if you create a more targeted campaign.  This means it is a virtuous circle whereby you get higher clicks per 100 impressions (the definition of a higher CTR), which Google rewards with a lower CPC (and higher Profit Margin), and then Google rewards us with a higher impression share and therefore even more traffic.
5. Consider Using Modified Broad instead of Phrase and Broad – Modified Broad is more targeted than broad since it does not pull in synonyms, but is less restrictive than phrase since you do not have to guess the order of the words in the keyword.  To make life simpler, consider using only exact match and modified broad.  Exact match keywords are your goal, with modified broad as your net to catch more exact match keywords.  A good way of using modified broad and exact match is to split them into two separate campaigns.  Then put negatives of the exact match keywords into the modified broad campaign.  This will force the exact match traffic into the exact match campaign.  If you had a phrase campaign too then this methodology gets confusing and messy.
6. Divide and Conquer – Using exact match keywords allows you to divide your broad and phrase match sets of keywords into individual segments.  Each exact match keyword (search term) has a different cost.  Having them all grouped under a phrase or broad match hides the individual data so you cannot see or optimise each search term.  In the same way, consider dividing an exact match keyword by IP address (e.g. [payday loans] showing throughout the US, could be divided into 51 different state campaigns each showing [payday loans] but with a state targeted ad creative.  This will show you the price and traffic volumes of [payday loans] in different locations).
7. Consider Splitting Google Search and Search Partners Traffic – Yes there will be an overlap, but you might find most of your Google Search traffic heads towards your Google Search campaign and you have effectively divided your Google Search and Search Partners traffic.  Another benefit to this technique is that you can use the Search Query Report for the Google Search campaign and be 100% sure that each of the search terms identified are actual queries that users typed into the Google search engine.
8. Consider Splitting Computers and Laptops and Mobile Devices Traffic -These could have different traffic behaviours, both in terms of price and volumes, but also in terms of conversion rates.  Greater visibility and greater control may assist if you split the campaigns.  They can be optimised separately.
9. Definitely Split Search and Display Traffic – This is such as basic optimisation step we should not even need to talk about it!  Search and Display are like chalk and cheese… they look the same, but are completely different.
10. Give It Time! – Don’t keep tinkering with things.  You need enough data to make a decision.  Also, the Google algorithm takes a while to reach a decision on what quality score to give you, what CPC to charge you, and how you measure up against your competition.  Try not to tinker too often, and beware “creeping elegance”, which is the 80/20 rule used in reverse (you did the 80% of the work on Monday, and now are going to creep the performance up slowly from Tuesday to Friday… you would be better starting another four similar projects and getting them 80% done in one day apiece).
11. Campaigns Are Like Fine Wine – They should mature with age!  Not only do they “bed in” to find their eventual level, but you should be growing and nurturing your campaign over time.  This means that you are spending a significant proportion of your time growing your account and not just in bid adjustments.  Accounts can grow outwards by getting more coverage for keywords and verticals that you do not currently have, and they can grow downwards by you drilling into a niche and extracting more traffic, more revenues, and more profits.
12. Drill Down – Sometimes when you are busy expanding your campaigns outwards by adding in new keywords and verticals (increasing your coverage), you may pass over an oil well.  It could be worth trying to drill down by going long tail or using other tricks to extract more traffic, revenues, and profit.   Basically, if it looks promising you should consider pausing your expansion outwards and drill deeper.
13. Consider One Keyword Per Campaign – You can have 100 campaigns in each account.  If a keyword is more than 1% of your impressions, clicks, or cost, why not put it into a campaign all on its own?  That way you can monitor the impression share of that keyword.
14. One Keyword Per Adgroup – This is as great for optimising for Adwords.  It might make it harder to report on, and to optimise if your account grows in size because you have more Adgroups.  It is a tradeoff that you will have to decide on, but consider that an adgroup optimised for Adwords should have a lower CPC and a higher Profit Margin and should require less management than a less well optimised adgroup.
15. Split Test Ad Copy – If there is enough traffic to justify spending the time on the test, then you should consider creating a new ad to beat the CTR of your current ad.  Make sure you Rotate Ads Evenly if you want this to be a valid test.  Do not delete old ads, but keep them there so you can see how you gradually increased your CTR using different Ad Copy.  If you are worried about losing traffic by creating an new ad, then maybe send a fraction of your traffic to the new ad.  You can do this by creating, say, nine copies of your current ad, and one new ad.  That way 10% of your traffic should go through the new ad.
16. Rotate Ads Evenly – If you want to split-test your Ads, then make sure you do not have the campaign setting to be such that Google shows the Ad it believes is more “optimised”.  Don’t believe their algorithm, plus don’t give up control of your split testing.  You want to always know what copy works better, and have an idea why.  If you let Google choose, then you will not know by how much better your new ad works.  Note: don’t just change your campaign settings if things have been running a while… optimised ads may indeed be the better performing ones, and you don’t want to suddenly have the other poorly performing ads showing.
17. Google Keeps Information From Us – They tell us that there is a quality score at the adgroup, campaign, account, and domain level, but they do not tell us what it is.  We can calculate them using weighted averages, but it is interesting that they do not do this for us.  Google also do not display the historical quality score of a keyword.  You can look at all the other metrics for a keyword over a historical period, but the quality score that you see is the quality score that Google currently has in the system for that keyword.  This is not an accident, but a decision Google made and had to program into their interface and reports.  This should makes you wonder what advantages you can gain over your competitors if you recorded your keyword quality score over time.  Another metric that they have at one level of detail but not at another is the impression share.  It would be nice to know what share of voice we have for a particular keyword in a campaign, but Google only shows us the Impression Share at campaign level.  For very important keywords, Consider One Keyword Per Campaign, otherwise consider using the campaign impression share as an indicator of the impression share for each keyword in the campaign.  It is a rough guide, but can help you estimate the number of searches that were made that your keyword could have triggered ads for.
18. Every Threat is an Opportunity – If Google changes its algorithm and we experience a “Google Slap”, (or even if Google introduces new functionality), there is a window of opportunity where we can benefit by exploiting the fact that our competitors have not reacted yet.  We should be agile and react quickly to exploit these opportunities when they occur.

Google Adwords is a powerful tool for getting sales leads and market intelligence, yet like most tools the results you get will depend on how well you use it.

Here’s 11 handy tips to help you get the most out of Google Adwords:

1. Determine how you want your website to help your business

Is it to give you credibility for when you speak to people at trade fairs? Is it primarily to showcase your products, or will you be hoping people order online through the website? Note that you are much more likely to get visitors to give you their emails so that you can follow them up rather than make sales from their first contact with you. You can see this as a two step marketing strategy where you are building a prospects list and trying to move them into your customers list. Note too that you ideally have customers rather than buyers! A buyer being someone who’s bought from you once, and a customer who buys from you regularly.

2. Find out what people are looking for

Perform keyword research to find out what people are searching for, how much traffic is out there, and how seasonal it is. There will also be typical keyword trails as people learn more and move through the buying cycle gathering information and moving towards making a purchase. For example: “plasma tv” -> “sony plasma tv” -> “sony xyz plasma tv review” -> …

3. Perform competitor analysis

Check out all your competitors by finding out what they are bidding on, what their ads are, and what their landing pages are like. Are they trying to make a sale there and then, or are they trying to capture leads? Create a swipe file for each of your main competitors noting both good ideas and things that you think you can do better at. If you copy the best of all your competitors you are almost automatically best of breed, without even adding your own unique ideas!

4. Perform market research

Don’t waste time and money developing your website, services, or products only to find out later that there is no market for them. Maybe you can set up ad campaigns that send people to special landing pages where you ask them to fill in a survey. Analysing the survey will give you valuable insights, help you to start building your lists, and give you contact details of well qualified and motivated leads you can follow up with straight away. Ideally you can use the surveys to determine different market segments and create sales funnels and products meeting each of their needs.

5. Focus on the low hanging fruit

Don’t compete on terms everyone else is competing on just because there is a lot of traffic.  This traffic might not be for people ready to buy, but could be for people who are in the research phase of the buying cycle.  Often you can be paying more for these clicks than for the “long tail” keywords of someone closer to buying. In less mature markets, these long tail keywords might be ignored by your competition.

6. Review your actual stats

Where should you be concentrating your efforts initially? Your top 20-30 keywords might account for 95% of your traffic. Beware trying to maximize click-through-rates though (see below).

7. Improve through testing

Does each Adgroup have a couple of different ads setup that are being shown evenly? Proper split testing allows you to determine what works best, kill off the weaker version, and create a new one to try and beat the current champion. This not only allows you to continually and incrementally improve performance of your campaigns, but gives you an insight into what is going on in your prospects heads. Note that you can and should be split testing each step in the sales processs… from ad ctr, to landing page conversion rates, to response to emails sent out, etc.

8. Have separate landing pages for each ad

The landing page should be specific to the ad and what the prospect is looking for. Don’t send people to your home page if they want to know about 21st birthday cards… send them to the 21st birthday cards page.

9. Make sure you get stats from your Adwords campaigns

Don’t be completely handsoff with regards to your Adwords campaigns. If you outsource the setup and management of the campaign then insist on seeing regular stats. If you don’t then you will be losing out on valuable market intelligence that can help you to identify where your business can grow and be most profitable. You need to know what is happening within your campaigns since Adwords is much more than a tool to send traffic to your site.

10.  Install Google Analytics and get it configured

Google Analysitcs will help you determine your conversion rate as well as your click through rate. An ad with a higher CTR isn’t necessarily the ad that will get you the most conversions. You want to maximise your ROI and profits, not maximise your CTR. Together with your Adwords stats you will be getting more information than most of your competitors… you just have to read it and then act on it!

11. Detemine your average visitor value

Once you know how much a visitor is worth on average, then you know how much you can spend per click. If you have a good back-end system where you build a customer database and increase your repeat business, then you can even make a slight loss on your ad campaigns to get the first sale. But you need to know your costs and customer value before you can do this. Having a better back end sales process than your competitors allows you to bid more for each keyword group, which is a positive feedback loop as you can get a higher ctr which will reduce your average cpc (cost per click), ad infinitum. This can actually mean you can eventually dominate a market segment over time!

As always, you should be interested in the benefits of using Google Adwords, not in Google Adwords features!

1. You only pay for clicks

Google Adwords works by displaying Ads that are triggered when people within a certain geographic location search for specific “keyword phrases”. The Ads are displayed for free, and you only pay Google when people actually click on the Ad and have come to your website’s “landing page” (the page you have the Ad direct them to). You therefore only pay for visitors.

2. Imagination and relevance are rewarded

If you’re clever or imaginative, you can bid on keyword phrases where there is no competition, and end up paying less than 10c a click! Google also rewards you for relevance, so if your Ad is clicked on more than your competitors, then your Ad can be positioned above theirs with you paying less per click.

3. Ads can show on related websites

As well as displaying on Google search results, you can have Ads display on websites that Google thinks are a good match for your Ad content.

4. You perform market research at the same time

Using Adwords correctly can not only drive traffic to your website, but can allow you to determine what most of your prospects are searching for, and the best message to use to get them to buy from you.

5. You can get your customers to help you

Smart businesses even do things like “split-test” two Google Ads with different domain names to find out what company name appeals more to their prospects. They let the market vote with their clicks rather than try and second guess them.

6. You can test the waters quickly and cheaply

Before you spend too much on your business you can setup a few webpages and Ads and see what traffic is out there and how motivated searchers are to buy. You can even setup surveys on the landing pages to find out what people are searching for and why, and can collect email addresses of interested parties before you’ve spent anything creating your products or fancy website!

7. It can save you advertising money

Using Adwords allows you to hone your advertising/marketing campaigns before you start using other media channels such as magazines or direct mail.