These 10 Critical AdWords Account Settings will Safeguard the Health of your Campaigns (plus a Bonus 11th for B2B Advertisers…)

1. Make sure you have included a backup Credit Card on your account - Google knows when your card is about to expire or is no longer working.

   If your payment fails, ALL your advertising is immediately suspended.

   You won't know about this until you login to your account and see an alert, or zero impressions on your campaigns.

   Strangely enough, Google does not email you to inform you of this.

   You can, however, setup mobile text alerts (free, but with your normal cellphone costs) so that's something to consider based on the criticality of your advertising. 
   

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2. Only target a single Country with any one Campaign. It sounds obvious, but it's easy to go for a large audience at once with a Campaign targeting multiple, or all countries.

   Keep in mind that these different countries are in different time zones, have different demographics, cultures, and terminology.

   You need to treat each one differently and monitor progress and conversions carefully in each location.

   In large countries across multiple time zones (e.g USA), you might even want to split your campaigns into Regions, Metropolitan areas, or Cities i.e Geo-Targeting.

   Real-world example: I was running a successful campaign in the UK for a holiday-planner spreadsheet. It was a failure in the USA until we started using "Vacation" keywords! 
   

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3.  Only target a single Network per campaign. Google offers three: (1) Google only, (2) Google Search Partners (AOL, Lycos, ntl, Froogle etc), (3) Google Content (any other website in the world opted in to the Google AdSense service i.e displaying AdWords ads).

   Again, all three have completely different demographics, distribution coverage and responses, and should be treated and measured separately.

   By default, all three networks are selected when creating a new campaign.

   The Content Network is claimed to reach 80% of Internet users, and can generate absolutely colosal quantities of Impressions. CTR is usually very low on Content, but can provide some great quality conversions if you manage it correctly.

   You should certainly disable Content, and I recommend Search Partners also. You can create campaigns to test these networks later. 
   

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4. Create at least two ads and set them to rotate evenly in your Campaign Delivery settings tab, (not Optimise). Having only a single ad means you're losing any opportunity to test incremental (and sometimes huge) ad improvements.

   It's this that will allow you to beat your competitors over time as improvements in ad CTR allow you to reduce bid prices and get more clicks for less.

   (Tip: by refeshing your browser you'll see which ads change and who's split-testing more than one. Anyone who's ad doesn't change is paying "The Stupid Tax" to Google, so don't be one of them!) 
   

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5. Ensure your keywords appear somewhere in the Ad, preferably the headline.

   These keywords willl be bolded and invite a much better response.

   Again, any ad not showing bolded keywords is likely paying The Stupid Tax. 
   

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6. Group tightly-related keywords together into a single ad group. Use as few keywords as possible per group.

   The AdWords Editor makes this very easy if you already have large groups of keywords.

   Then you can target your ads to very specific keywords to ads to help get the highest response.

   It's very possible to consistently get keyword CTR at 20%, 30%, 50%, even 100% by doing this. 
   

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7. Ensure you're using negative keywords. This is frequently overlooked but exceptionally powerful. 

   By simple math, displaying your ad less often for the same clicks increases your CTR to let you bid less for higher positions.

   Most AdWords advertisers don't realise there are actually 8 different types of Negative Keywords.

   One of my advertiser accounts currently has 1,508 Negative Keywords.  
   

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8. Use all three keyword match types (broad, "phrase", [exact]) but beware of the broad expanded feature of Google, which can be a blessing or a curse depending on what you're advertising.
   

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9. Make use of the Search Query reports and your server logs - these can contain a treasure-trove of new keywords and negatives actually being used in getting ad clicks and traffic from organic rankings, sometimes very unexpectedly… 
   

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10. Track Conversions at all times! 

    If you don't use downloads, page views, sales or contact forms to do so and depend on phone calls or emails, read "Scientific Advertising" by Claude Hopkins (written nearly a Century ago) to see how the piuoneers of Direct Response Marketing did this in the early days. 
    

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11. (Bonus) For Business-to-Business advertisers, set campaign schedules ("Day-Parting") to only run during working hours and not at weekends.

    This will filter out a lot of the "noise" generated in the Retail, Consumer, B2C marketplace.

    You can test this with separate campaigns identical in all other respects (again, the AdWords Editor makes this easy).

David Rothwell is a Google AdWords Qualified Individual with 3 years experience, with 59 client accounts spending almost $42,000.00 per month.

He provides account audits, training, coaching and consultancy on all aspects of AdWords website marketing.

The views expressed in this article are the personal opinion of the Author.

(C) 2008 David Rothwell | www.AdWordsAnswers.com | david@adwordsanswers.com

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