In this post, I will show you how to keep your campaign CTR high and keep your campaign costs to a minimum. The techniques I am showing today is based on hard-and-fast rules. Just like good stock market investors, rules give you consistent outcome and keep the emotion side of the game out of the picture. This is really important because it is easy to get too “attached” to your campaign and let your emotions cloud your judgment and decisions.

Setup Your Baseline

Use these values as a starting point for all your campaigns.

  1. Ensure you have 1000-2000 broad keywords. It is important to have a large set of broad keywords as you literally are throwing shit against the wall to see which keywords stick. Because Adwords allows 2000 adgroups per campaign, I would place each keyword into its own adgroup.
  2. Set your starting bid at $0.18-0.20 (USD). This is the magic number that is enough to get some impressions flowing. If you cannot get impressions, then your market is either too competitive or there is no interest in your keywords (i.e. your niche is not popular).
  3. Set your daily budget to $15. This will allow your campaign to stop at $15 for you to inspect your campaign’s success. If by $15, you still have not generated revenue in your campaign, then it is time to abandon the campaign entirely. You can increase this budget as you feel more confident about the campaign.

Monitor Your Campaign

If you thought getting your campaign live on the network was all the hard work, you haven’t seen anything yet. When you first launch your campaign, you need to carefully monitor and babysit your campaign. The goal is to optimize your CTR and lower your bid costs.

  1. Start lowering bids after 1000 impressions. Once you know that your campaign can generate traffic, it is time to make your first bid change. Lower your bids by $0.01-0.02 each time and do not exceed more than 3 bid changes per day. Stop lowering bids once you’ve reached around $0.06-0.10.
  2. Optimize your CTR by pruning. The purpose of pruning is to discard keywords that are bringing down your overall CTR for the campaign. I believe that Google looks at the overall CTR for “all time”. So you best babysit your campaign at the start to not let your CTR run too low. My advice is to check your campaign and prune every hour using the following rules:
    1. Delete adgroups lower than 0.15% CTR.
    2. Delete adgroups with 500 impressions and 0 clicks.

Note: You campaign should be able to reach 100,000 impressions per day easily. If you are having trouble, it is possible that your niche is too narrow or specialized. Once you start pruning your adgroups, your impressions should drop below 10,000 but your CTR should stay in the 1-5% range. To put this into perspective, this gives you 100-500 clicks to your poll page. That’s pretty reasonable.

Take-Away Points

To lower your bids on Adwords, you need to ensure that your CTR is very high (i.e. >1%). In order to achieve this, you need to prune and drop poor performing adgroups. If you wait too long to do this, you have doomed your campaign by letting the impressions run away with low CTRs. Therefore, do not launch your campaigns and go to bed. Sit there and monitor your campaign every hour to stay ahead of the CTR race.