There are a number of strategies AdWords Management Professionals use to improve their clients' performance with Google AdWords. Our experience has been that implementing just the small set of strategies listed below typically lowers our clients' click costs by 37%, and increase click through rates (CTR) by 82%. Of course, many times the improvements are much greater than this!

1. Split Testing

Both the AdWords ad and the landing page elements should be constantly split-tested, using the standard chi-squared formula for statistical significance. This means you ALWAYS have 2 ads running, one the control, and the second an attempt to beat the control... and you declare a new control as soon as sufficient clicks have been collected (according to the chi-squared formula) to prove one ad superior to the other.

Now this can be time-consuming, of course. And this is why the smartest advertisers often choose to outsource this laborious effort to a Management Company.

2. Proper Keyword Selection

Have you looked at the keywords being used by your top 5 competitors, as well as the top ranked websites in the organic search results?

Almost all markets we've looked at are best served with keyword lists in the 500-5,000 keyword range. You're simply missing some of the best traffic when you only use the most obvious 10-20 major keywords in your market!

Professionals often use proprietary tools to ferret out these keywords.

Likewise, you should be testing all 3 match types for each of these keywords, as they often produce vast differences in ROI (return on investment).

3. Proper AdWords Ad and Account Structure

In today's pay-per-click environment it's absolutely critical to include your precise keyword in your ad and on your landing page... which usually means very tightly-focused ad groups.

Now when you have a keyword list of 2,000 keywords as suggested above, it becomes quite tedious to develop almost that many ad groups and ads and landing pages to meet this requirement. Again, that's why smart advertisers are turning to AdWords Management Professionals to provide this service.

Of course, there are even more strategies employed by Companies like us to improve our clients' ROI and AdWords performance, including keyword-level conversion tracking, effective use of the Content Network (a book by itself!), bid adjustment by keyword, etc.

So I hope you can begin to see how the combination of all these strategies could dramatically improve CTR's, lower click costs, and improve your Return On Investment.