I'm going to take a wild guess about your AdWords account: I predict that 95 percent of your Web site traffic is coming from fewer than ten keywords. Maybe fewer than five. I know this not because I'm psychic (I knew you were thinking that), but because in five years of helping people with AdWords, most accounts I've seen have been tilted in that direction. In fact, it's not uncommon for an online business to live or die based on a single keyword.

Your most important AdWords job is to identify star keywords and give them everything they need to be happy and healthy. Limos, special diets, bathtubs filled with Perrier — these keywords must receive ongoing attention if they are to perform at a high level.

Of course, keywords aren't really pampered Hollywood stars, so my suggestions in the previous paragraph are meant to be understood metaphorically. What keywords really want are relevant ads in the right positions taking the searcher to an appropriate landing page. All your keywords want this; your job as an advertiser is to give it to them to the extent you can. But if you're building your campaigns correctly, with hundreds or thousands of long-tail keywords, it's easy to lump your star keywords in with the hoi polloi and lose a lot of potential sales.

If you didn't connect with the Hollywood-stars metaphor, here's one inspired by my visit to the North Carolina State Fair last fall: Your hundreds or thousands of keywords are like apples in your orchard, while the star keywords are your prize milk-fed pumpkins. Each pumpkin gets as much attention as an orchard of apples. (If you need more metaphors, you're on your own.)

Finding star keywords

To identify your star keywords, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your AdWords account at www.google.com/adwords and get to the Campaign Summary page (you may be taken there by default).

2. Click the Keywords tab to show all the keywords in your account.

3. Click the Impr tab to sort the keywords from most to fewest impressions.

   You should see all your keywords already sorted by impressions, as shown in Figure 8-1. In many accounts, the top five to ten keywords receive more traffic than all the rest combined. Within individual ad groups, this phenomenon is often even more pronounced.

Figure 8-1. The top two keywords in this ad group have received 94 percent of the search impressions.

Figure 8-1 tells a typical story: The top two keywords, [gout diet] and gout diet, together have received 82 percent of the total search impressions for this ad group (560,642 out of 597,064). A closer examination shows that [gout diet] is significantly underperforming in terms of traffic: Its average position is 8.5, putting it on the second page of search results much of the time. Were I to raise its bid, that keyword would generate even more impressions. (Whether that move would be profitable depends on the cost per conversion for that keyword, which you can explore in Chapter 14.)

Although it's convenient to see all your keywords in one big list, keyword management is best done within individual ad groups. That way you can view each keyword in context, and determine its contribution to its group, and its relative performance. You can easily get to a keyword's ad group by clicking the ad group name to the right of the keyword.

Your solid performers are keywords that consistently generate decent numbers of impressions, but nowhere near the stratospheric output of the stars. In Figure 8-2, the first four keywords generate two-thirds of the total impressions. The next 8 keywords are the solid performers, each generating between 1,400 and 6,900 impressions.

Figure 8-2. The keywords from "cold calls" to making cold calls are all solid performers.

The long-tail keywords are the ones receiving low numbers of impressions and the occasional click. They just don't get enough traffic to justify their own ad or landing page, but collectively are worth bidding on because they are cheaper than other keywords and convert better because there's less competition. These two factors lower your global average cost of customer acquisition and can mean the difference between a struggling and a dominant business.

Each long tail isn't anything to write home about, but collectively they may be doing more for your business than any of your top performers are. It's like the hardworking character actors, lighting directors, third associate key grips, and assistant best boys who don't get all the credit but without whom the movies don't get made. The names in the credits at the end of the movie are the long-tail keywords.

You will improve performance by grouping the long-tail keywords by concept. For the gout campaign example, I used the following concepts to group long-tail keywords:

As we've seen, a keyword will underperform if it points to an ad that doesn't address the right desires, or if that ad is positioned too high or too low (based on that keyword's maximum CPC). If the problem is too few impressions, check your average position for that keyword. Your ad may be showing on page 4, where few searchers are willing to go. Or your ad may be lower than third position in a Content Network campaign.

The quickest way to identify underperforming keywords is to create filters within the Keywords tab. For example, here's how to set a filter for all keywords with at least 200 impressions and a CTR of less than 0.2%:

Figure 8-3. Use filters to quickly identify low CTR keywords in need of attention.

After you set up conversion tracking (described in Chapter 14), you discover that some keywords appear to be doing well within the AdWords account — lots of traffic, good CTR — but don't convert to sales well enough to justify the cost of their clicks. This type of underperformance is especially insidious because it's hard to identify. In Chapter 14, I show you how to spot Expense Account Gluttons that cost you more than they make for you.

You deal with negative-ROI keywords by first trying the tactic just described for underperforming keywords: point them to better ads. If the increased CTR doesn't make them profitable, add negative qualifiers such as price and other disincentives to click (see Chapter 6). If nothing works, you have to let them go. Don't worry about them — someone else will blissfully (and cluelessly) continue losing money on those keywords. Just don't let it be you.