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I am often asked as a professional, how I manage my AdWords campaigns. The answer I guess is - experience, now this is not too helpful when you are wrestling with your first AdWords account and failing to make it work profitably. Most of my clients first approached me because they had spent a packet and had no worthwhile return. Therefore, I intend to make this AdWords thread a diary of the life and times of an AdWords manager. Subscribe and, over the coming months, you may pick up a few tips and tricks that will help you with your own AdWords campaigns. Post a comment if you want, Tell me about your AdWords management problems and I will try to help. I recently won back an old account. She had wanted a local touch, (being London based) and had read about a London Internet Marketing 'Guru' "Don't you just hate that word"? The 'Guru' had optimised her PPC campaign for greatest number of visitors at the lowest cost per visitor. The client is a Private Doctor so Conversion tracking is virtually impossible. However, when the client returned to me, a primary reason was that the number of patient consultation booked had not increased. Looking closely at the miss-managed campaign revealed a number of possible reasons: 1. All the AdWords campaigns were targeted nationwide, yet her surgery is in central London. 2. The were only bidding on low cost keywords and were ignoring high cost keywords. 3. Many keywords were marked down by Google as poor quality. No attempt to improve keyword quality had been attempted. Lets look at these AdWords Campaign problems individually. 1. I created a new AdWords campaign by cloning one of the original campaigns that was concerned with general private medicine. So I now had two identical campaigns, One I targeted on London and the other was targeted on everywhere else but not London. The campaign budget was split between the two. The creative's all indicated that the surgery was in central London. This enabled us to advertise differently to those prepared to travel, perhaps from Scotland. We felt that while people looking for a second opinion were very likely to want to consult with a top London doctor, those simply seeking a private GP would not.Prospects within the M25 circle who would happily travel to central London can now be targeted separately. 2. This is a common trap. Many AdWords newbies read that they must optimise for lowest CPC. This is not always so In this example, although average CPC was £0.18 there were a few keywords that commanded a far higher price. Take the keyword 'private medical health check' Just to bid for 1st page inclusion would cost £1.75 The previous campaign managers were spooked by this and simply ignored these inactive keywords. The keyword quality was fine so I consulted with the client. I explained that costly keywords get that way because the price is bid up by all the competing advertisers. They see the keyword as having great worth. Private health checks can cost hundreds of pounds so an AdWords cost per client acquisition of £75 is quite acceptable. Having established this, we agreed to divert some budget from another Ad Group that creates good CTR but generates little business. Over the next few weeks I will be monitoring this Ad Group closely. 3. If you don't have Keyword quality showing in your campaigns - you should, go enable them right away. This client has many keywords marked as poor. I have paused them and will deal with them over the next few weeks. Google is actually doing us a very big service here. It indicates that the landing page is poor quality. This will mean poor conversion on these keywords. Pause them as I have done, address the landing page issues and try them again.