How the Heavy Hitters do Adwords…Part I

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.