Refining Google AdWords

One of the most important things of any Google AdWords campaign is to continually test and refine.  The best practices for Google AdWords is to continually test and refine keywords, text ads, display ads, placements, ad extensions, target locations, and on and on.

When testing so many things, it is easy to test things that don’t matter (yet) before testing things that really matter – or will have a big impact more immediately.

Perry Marshall would always tell me that in each of those things you could test is an 80/20 grouping.  There will be a few things that will have a big impact (the 20%), and the rest a minute impact on your results (the 80%.)  BUT, he would also say:

“Before you test the little stuff, test the big stuff and work your way down. Test the Forest, then the Trees, then the Branches, then the Leaves..”

People often get hung up on testing the punctuation of an ad when they haven’t tested multiple variations of drastically different ads first.

The punctuation will have an effect, and has proven to produce big results in many cases, but how much bigger would the results be if you first identified an ad that is %30 more effective than the current ad?

The idea is to make sure you are in the right forest, with the right trees, before you climb the branches and begin polishing the leaves.

Tweaking the leaves of the wrong kind of tree in the wrong forest just uses a lot of time and money for nothing.