Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 16

Cloning Your Campaigns for Greater Precision

In This Chapter

• The benefits of campaign cloning
• Push-button cloning with AdWords Editor
• Limitations to cloning
• Cloning examples

Conventional baseball wisdom holds that poor teams can only afford marginal players, so they just can't compete with the rich teams. In Moneyball, Michael Lewis profiles Billy Beane, a general manager for the Oakland Athletics baseball team, which won the most games in Major League Baseball in 2002 despite having the smallest payroll.

He did it by being an egghead about statistics, rather than just going with his gut or following conventional wisdom. He was able, for example, to predict which minor league players would succeed in the major leagues by using a couple of key statistics that no one else realized were significant.

He won games by fiercely playing the percentages: where to position the outfielders, when to bunt, when to replace the starting pitcher with a relief pitcher, and a thousand other situations. By having data at his fingertips and understanding how to interpret and act on it, he found an advantage in every encounter.

The result: The Oakland Athletics won 103 games, the same number as the New York Yankees. The Yankees paid $126 million in payroll, while the Athletics paid only $40 million. One of the most important sentences in the book applies directly to you and me: “In professional baseball it still matters less how much money you have than how well you spend it.”

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