Overwhelmed by all the advice you read about running an AdWords campaign? Here’s a simple and concise list I’ve gathered from several reliable sources:

1. Break your campaign in groups of 10-20 highly related keywords.
2. Use exact matching or phrase matching, but avoid broad matching.
3. Use negative keywords (e.g., -free) to improve CTR & lower cost.
4. Put keywords in the headline and repeat them in the body.
5. Body: 1st line = descriptive benefit and 2nd line = a feature, offer, or call to action.
6. Create separate landing pages for each target keyword group and make content relevant to keywords, putting the landing pages in sub-directories named after target keywords and making sure the sub-directory is included in display URL: www.blah.com/keyword.
7. Find tangential keywords. **
8. Always run 2 ads side-by-side. ***
9. Run different campaigns for different geographical regions (e.g. US vs. Europe).
10. Search Search Network and Content network ads in separate campaigns with lower CPC and daily budgets.

Notes:

* Make sure to disallow duplicated pages in your robots.txt file to avoid Google’s duplicate content penalty.

** Example of tangential keywords: I make flowcharting software. I targeted the keywords “E-Myth” and “EMyth” because I figured entrepreneurs who were standardizing their business processes might want to flowchart them. It worked.

*** Shuffle the word order, capitalization, try synonyms, price vs no price, etc. Run a week at a time and always replace the poor performer with a tweaked version of the good performer.