Train Marketing Biceps: Your 10 Minute #AdWords Management Workout - #infographic

An Adwords overview suitable for advertisers working with third-party digital agencies and wanting to evaluate what a ‘management fee’ should in most cases be buying for them. In other cases, for those who have not refined their workflow and management process and feeling a little over committed after noticing a huge skyscraper of workload peering down at them; learning to maintain multiple campaigns can get a little tricky.

The ’10 minute AdWords Workout’ could be defined as a non-comprehensive, easy to follow series of best practice overviews.

“When do I optimise”
“What do I optimise”
“How do I optimise”

Programmatic marketing, automation and scripts to aside, Klientboost coin three terms defining set personas and approaches for manual workload:

The Slimmer

‘Cut your losses’ approach, chomping through the campaign and rolling it back to a more manageable state. It’s a reasonable goal; things have got a little out of hand ever since you started increasing the reach of a campaign, before you had a chance to understand frequency and impression share. A smaller and more restricted campaign build makes it easier to manage 9i.e. know what works, and what does not).

Karate Chop High

Duration: 60 Seconds

Use your search query reports to examine the search queries that have triggered clicks, and find high costing phrases you don’t need. On the other hand, if the keyword generates a high volume of costly clicks and no conversions, consider axing it from the campaign.

Change Ad Schedule

Duration: 60 Seconds

When you venture into the ‘Dimensions Tab’ you will find a section to view performance by day of week, and hour of day. Make a decision on whether or not it is beneficial to advertise in the middle of the night, or middle of the day, chances are you have a top of the page position when everyone is asleep and drop down to the right hand side when competition increases during lunchtime searches.

Geographic Locations

Duration: 60 Seconds

Rather than attempting to compete with advertisers nationwide, start picking more accurate geographic locations. This will ensure you are able to channel your budget towards the areas you get the most clicks and conversions from. You can find this data in the ‘user locations’ report, dimensions tab.

Add Negative Keywords

Duration: 120 Seconds

Sometimes it is harder to know what to bid on, in comparison to what not to bid on. Decrease the reach of your keywords by finding and adding words you know will not lead to a conversion, using your search query report.

Increase Quality Score

Duration: 190 Seconds

Increasing the quality of a campaign includes factors like expected click through rate, landing page relevance, geographic locations and device performance. To make things more measurable you might decide to add new keywords into a single adgroup, and increase the likelihood of all future data generated by that keyword, to be localised at the adgroup level.

Lower Keyword Bids

Duration: 30 Seconds

If you know a keyword has been performing well, and achieved a consistent level of clicks and conversions, you could be a little cheeky and drop that bid by around 5%—10% to see if you can maintain the same performance for a lower cost.

Change Your Offer

Duration: 30 Seconds

Users get bored of seeing the same offers, and even when they don’t – they will be attracted by the best and most recent offers shown by competitors. If you can improve your current promotion with an update, go ahead and do so. This tactic will ensure your online approach is in competition with other online advertisers, as opposed to expecting a price twice the size to be considered a good deal.

The Maintainer

Appears to be a Usain Bolt of AdWords Management, whizzes through his adwords campaign every other day making sure a client is getting true value for money clicks, views, engagement and more. A logical goal during optimisation is to improve ‘relevance’. Ensuring a keyword the advertiser is being found for is offered on the linked website and communicating the information a potential buyer requires in short text or shopping adverts, and extensions.

Speed Adding Negatives

Duration: 180 Seconds

If you see a word that you most definitely did not want to pay for in your search query report, simply press CTRL+F or CMND+F and see how many times you were found for the same keyword. Remember to look at the bottom right of the table; over there you can switch the number of rows from 30 to 500. The maintainer ensures they are being found for the most relevant search queries, and block out the bad. Customise your columns and import data like ‘bounce rate’ – whatever it takes to speed up the identification of bad quality keywords.

Negative Keyword List Adding

Duration: 15 Seconds

At fifteen seconds, some might say Klientboost need to account for adwords screen loading speeds; after compiling a list of generic, and account specific negative keywords- the maintainer will boost through campaign builds by adding huge negative keywords lists in a few clicks.

Bad Ad Pausing

Duration: 60 Seconds

Ensure the ads you are pausing have been served in a good ratio to the ‘winning ad’, otherwise you will end up comparing an advert that only 5 people saw against one with 500 impressions that inevitably would have generated more clicks and conversions. However, with a bit of segmentation to make sure your ads are not losing clicks and conversions due to the right hand side – the maintainer will keep a close eye on ads to understand how best to talk to the customer.

New Champion Ads

Duration: 90 Seconds

For effective experiments, the maintainer will know to change a single line of a winning text ads (i.e. a/b split test) to identify the variables causing and effect in key campaign metrics. Call it a before and after test, and remember use a campaign experiment setting for statistical significance, or set ads to rotate evenly.

Bad Keyword Bid Lowering

Duration: 90 Seconds

When looking through keywords, Klientboost advises maintainers to lower the bid. I guess this is the best thing to do, but a side tip from digitalinformationworld.com is to move towards an automated bidding strategy like ECPC or CPA, which have the ability to learn markets and drop bids to 0 for you.

Good Keyword Bid Increasing

Duration: 90 Seconds

Again as above, but the opposite; a maintainer would boost down the keyword list and increase the bids on better performing keywords. However, now is the time for that maintainer to learn the value of bid strategies, and using automation to drive additional conversions to his site.

Creating & Saving Custom Filter

Duration: 90 Seconds

The quicker you can access the data you require, the quicker you can make decisions the next time you bolt through your workout. Create layouts for your data using custom columns, use filters, ad labels and make it easier for your future maintainer self to log in and work through this workout plan far quicker.

The Bulker

Flex your biceps, use positive data to improve performance and show your ‘auction insight’ competitors what you are truly made of. This workout is not for just ‘heavy weights’ but for those wanting to grow their campaign in the right direction. It makes sense to add more bulk to the campaign after profitability has been achieved via ‘slimmer’ and ‘maintainer’ workouts. So in short, once you have ensured everything is working, the only way is up.

Impression Share Increasing

Duration: 120 Seconds

In your custom columns, you will find impression share reports. If exact match impression share is too low, refine your match type or add more negatives to decrease the size of your reach. If you lost impressions due to budget, the campaign needs some more financial juice. Losing by rank can in some cases be controlled by bid (if you can no longer control quality). Go ahead and reach for 90%+ impressions share when you know things are working well.

Competition Spying

Duration: 180 Seconds

Use the auction insights to report to see how you weigh up against competitors and after that, Klient Boost share some cool third party tools that give you more insight into where your competitor ads appear and where. At DIW we would simply set the bids to target ‘outranking share’ and automatically outbid your competitors.

Broad Match Keyword Mining

Duration: 60 Seconds

Invest un-utilized budget on researching new variations of your working keywords, by going for broad match to find synonyms. This will then give you a portal to access new users who may have never seen your ads, and give back additional keywords to use in new adgroups.

Bid Modifier Increasing

Duration: 60 Seconds

Using the dimensions tab which should now be your joint favorite location with search attribution for data, understand the three key factors increasing competition. Time of day, schedule and device will see an increase in competition at varying points of your campaign; apply bid modifiers to reinforce your bidding power for the most competitive environments.

Keyword Bid Increasing

Duration: 60 Seconds

Use the segment option and evaluate top vs. other stats, sometimes the keyword will look like it is performing but falls to the right hand side every once in a while. Simply increase the bid to test your chances of winning more clicks at a higher rate from the top of Google or take chill pill and activate the flexible bid strategy for top of the page targeting.

Ad CTR Improving

Duration: 60 Seconds

Using the descriptions and headlines that work from other ads, roll out across other adgroups whilst maintaining keyword relevance to boost CTR using the language your customers most prefer.

Ad Extension Testing

Duration: 30 Seconds

You might know, the relevance of your ad extensions are a factor governing eventual ad rank. Create short sitelink descriptions to maximise ‘white space’ on mobile devices, ad new extensions, source new editorial reviews and make sure you compare performance using the segment ‘vs other extensions’ to evaluate the impact of changes.



Thank you to Johnathan Dane from Klient Boost for sending us what we would would say is one of the best AdWords gifographics to date. We look forward to learning more perspectives on how to manage campaigns and working through more workout plans.

During the interim, see Google’s official best practice guideline website which hosts tons and tons of actionable advice, guides and instructions.