How the Heavy Hitters do Adwords…Part I
January 18th, 2008 by 
Amit
A lot of affiliates ask me : “Amit, how in the world do you managed 50+ active campaigns on your Google account, including all the campaigns you have on multiple other search engines??”
Some of you may think that I spend 8 hours a day managing my ppc campaigns, well in fact I only log into my Adwords account about once a week, and up to 3-5 times a week only if I just launched a new campaign. As for MSN, Yahoo, and the other ppc campaigns I managed, I log in about once a month.
I do all this while I continue to grow my profits with about 5 other new projects I’m working on.
So the question remains how in the world do I manage all my existing ppc campaigns with such little time involvement?
Well I do a lot of things that make my consistent rock solid profits possible, I’m going to do series of posts, starting with this one, where I talk about some of the tools and strategies I use.
So here’s the deal…
Hands down the MOST powerful tool I use is a program that’s absolutely free call Adwords Editor. If you’re not using this tool download it immediately and make it your mission to become an expert at it.
Not only does Adwords Editor make it way easier and faster to launch a campaign, it allows you to do amazing things as far as campaign management and optimization is concerned.
Here’s just a few optimization techniques that you can do with Adwords Editor :
#1
In a previous post I talked about how you can use Adwords Editor to adjust your ad positions for all your ads, shift ads that are in position 1-3 down and shifting ads in positions 8+ up. You can check out the post here.
The “create or set custom view” feature is a powerful filter that I love using to optimize my campaigns :
There are dozens of creative ways of using this filter feature to get what you need done, here’s just a few:
#2
Make Changes Across Multiple Campaigns : First off, you can filter out EXACTLY the campaigns you want to change, and then apply your bulk changes across all of these campaigns at once.
#3
Segment & Remove Traffic : Let’s say you have a campaign about Widgets all going to the same landing page. You discover blue widget is getting a lot of traffic and conversions so you setup a separate landing page with unique content about blue widgets.
But now you have a problem, you have about a 100 ad groups scattered in your campaign all related to blue widgets, so if you just logged onto to Adwords online it could take you a good hour to make all the changes to the destination (and display url).
However, with Adwords Editor filter feature you can filter out all adgroup names that contain “blue” and instantly change the destination and display url for these ads!
On the other hand, let’s say you discover keywords related to green widgets were not converting at all, you could again use the filter feature to find all Adgroups the contain the word “green” and pause them.
Performance Statistics :
This one’s my favorite, even though it’s a pain in the butt waiting for your stats to download to Adwords Editor it’s totally worth it just to be able to use the Performance Statistics Filter.
Here’s one technique that works great:
After you launched a new campaign and let it run for a while, that could be a week or several months depending on how much traffic you’re getting, download your stats using Adwords Editor for the time your campaign was running.
#4
Now, extract all keywords (or adgroups if you do one keyword per adgroup) that have 200-300 clicks and Cost/Conv. = 0.0 using the Performance Statistics filter and then pause all these adgroups.
#5
If your product commission is $X, then can extract all adgroups that have a Cost/Conv > $2X and pause then. If the Cost/Conv is less than $2X but still greater than $X use the advanced bid change feature :
to lower your bids on these adgroups by 50%.
So listen up…
Adwords Editor is THE way to managed a large Adwords campaign, if you want have the very profitable problem of managing a large Adwords campaign here’s my advice : learn to use Adwords Editor, I mean LEARN EVERY SINGLE FEATURE.
Posted in Google™ AdWords, Super Affiliate Mindset | 
Great Post Amit.
Adwords Editor is great, works with my “imac” at home and my
“windows xp” at (ah ummm!!!) work. Sure is better than the web way.
As an affiliate, how is your cost/conv NOT $0.00? Surely you don’t get all the merchants you promote to place your google conversion code on their thank you pages - it’s not humanly possibly with a huge number of good offers out there. So what am I missing? Thanks!
Amit,
That was a great post I have already downloaded the adwords editor, but my problem is the quality score its driving me up the wall I can not get a good QS with anything even with direct matching keywords I been setting here 10-12 hours a day trying to master the QS because I can see that the QS is where its at maybe you’ll do a post on that some day.
Hi Tyler,
Check out :
http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/surviving-googles-landing-page-quality-score-part-ii/
Hi John,
I ONLY work with merchants that will place my tracking code on their thank you page.
Amit,
Thanks for the link this seems to be pretty easy stuff just takes time to learn my I got our company in the top 10 for website design as I speak also I run a link brokering network or getting ready to launce on, but my mind has got stuck into this affiliate stuff here lately, but every time I jump into it I have QS problems, but I’m going to read the link.
Thanks Amit
Amit,
I just got to thinking I bet my quality score is so low because I’m direct linking to a cellulite site…
I’m going to have my designer start building my landing pages and go from there maybe that will help.
Getting a good quality score by trying to direct link is usually pretty tough. Sometimes you can get the quality score to “OK” (or even “GREAT”, i would assume) by having a high CTR on a keyword, but most of the time direct linking leads to a poor QS.
A landing page will work wonders!
$1000 Affiliate Experiment,
I’m sure there is more to it then that, but I’m going to give it a try I gave it a try on our current site and my quality score was still reading poor, but I’m going to try a site thats got a lot of relevant keywords on the page…
I just don’t see it being as easy as putting a landing page up and getting a good great score there always a catch to whatever you do or I should say something that makes you grow..
So I’m just going to have to set down and test, test, and see what works then I’m sure once I start to find out what works I can start replicating it over, and over again.
Nice work having lot of information in a post
Hi Amit, didn’t know about your blog until today and it is a fun and a very informational read. I do have a question though. I have always used adwords, and I just started using Yahoo for the last couple of days, and have been screwed trying to use it.
1. I was still testing the waters and had set the daily spending limit to $5, but on the first day, it charged up over $19 (I thought, stupid me, I did not set a minimum bid for my keywords)
2. Next day I set the limit to $0.10 (lowest allowed) but still, it charged up $10 in half a day and I was still getting minimum bid of over $2.37 per click. wtf?
Is there an editor for adcenter and yahoo and a better way to manage them?
Amit,
Thanks for the great info! concerning tracking codes…
Tracking and analytics;
What package do you use?
Thanks, Nick