After hundreds of Adwords account consultations, I've often seen that a guy can have an account that's a real mess, but it's still working, still profitable. Great improvements can and must be made, BUT must be done without screwing up what was already working.
This is more important than people realize. Because in Google, on both the organic side and the paid side, longevity counts.
A lot of times people "fix" what was working and make it "better" only to find they've driven their
sales into the ground. I had a consultation with a gal in June where that's exactly what happened. She made the changes too quickly.
There's an easy way to avoid this - here's what you do. It's a variation of "Peel and Stick" that I call "Sticking without Peeling." You phase in new campaigns but you don't delete the old ones or the old keywords right away.
Typical example - Let's say you've got an old campaign with all these keywords in the same group:
electric guitar
Stratocaster
Les Paul guitar
The people commit by putting all these keywords in one group is that these three things are quite different. They should be in their own separate groups with different ads for each keyword.
Again, if it's still working OK the "wrong" way then don't delete the group or keywords that are working just yet. Create three new groups with two ads each. One ad should be the same as the old ad. The other ad should be more specific to the keyword - like an ad specifically about Stratocasters.
You turn on those new campaigns, preferably with slightly higher bid prices. Over time, Google will start to serve the new ads. Only after you've seen that the Click Thru Rates are higher, AND the conversions are good, do you begin to pull back the old campaign.
Instead of deleting the old keywords, just edit the bid prices on those individual keywords and cut them back. You can always pause the campaigns later. If
sales suddenly drop you can put everything back the way it was.
By following this method you can make dramatic improvements over time, but not risk your day-to-day business because ads take time to get approved, or CTR's take time to get established. And really, you should make any change to your marketing this way - with caution and care.
Remember that entrepreneurship is not about taking risks, but managing them. A profitable
AdWords campaign is exactly that - You, Google and your customer are all taking a risk. When you give the people what they want, risk is exchanged for reward and everyone moves ahead.
The same problem comes up when you split-test pages on your website. Sometimes the old one is worse than the new one, not better. Which is why Bryan and I have started interacting with visitors live as we make changes. There are always unanticipated consequences of every action, and when we dialogue with visitors live there are no surprises. The
sales funnel gets better with no risk of going backwards in the middle.
In Ari Galper's case,
sales conversions increased 10X. This was no accident, either. Ari knew something that the rest of us just didn't know
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