Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Managing Using the 80/20 Principle

As you build your AdWords account, you'll keep adding keywords in various match types: exact, phrase, broad, negative, modified broad. You may be worried about your account growing to a level of complexity (think of the Sorcerer's Apprentice scene from Disney's Fantasia), but the campaign management techniques we share in Chapter 10 allow you to handle tens or even hundreds of thousands of keywords in your account.

The key to making this work is the 80/20 Principle, which roughly states that 20 percent of your keywords lead to 80 percent of your positive results. In other words, you need to nurture a very few keywords individually, with special love and attention. The vast majority of your keywords can be managed en masse using AdWords Editor.

Three types of keywords you'll want to pay extra attention to are

• Scoundrels: Scoundrels (high cost, low, or no conversions) eat up your budget by generating lots of clicks but few conversions. Pause them while you improve your website to better serve that traffic, or exclude them if you can't achieve break-even.

  Zero-conversion keywords may seem like ordinary scoundrels, but they pose a hidden problem. When you sort keywords by cost per conversion, lower numbers are better than higher ones (in general). In other words, you'd rather pay $2 for a lead than $200. But keywords that generate no conversions at all are shown to have the lowest possible cost per conversion: $0.

  We've seen lots of clever people ...