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Monitoring Your AdWords Account

Your goal is to get to a point where you don't need to babysit your AdWords account because you're afraid of losing your shirt. If you follow the advice you'll find elsewhere on this site, that really shouldn't ever be a problem.

That said, there are a few things you need to monitor in your AdWords account to analyze how well a given campaign is going. If some of this terminology is confusing to you, check out Navigating AdWords for an overview.

On your Campaign Summary page, you'll want to keep an eye primarily on your Clicks, CTR and Cost. This is an overview of how much bang you're getting for each buck. If you're not getting many clicks, you might want to increase your bids. If your CTR is very low, maybe you need to visit your ad copy. And so on.

You also can use the Reports and Analytics tabs in your account to monitor things like:

• Where your visitors are coming from, which can help you focus your marketing efforts on those sources.
• How your keywords are performing, so you can get rid of the poor performers and ramp up spending for the ones that make you the most money.
• The performance of a particular ad, ad group or campaign.

Last, but certainly not least, it's good to monitor your total cost for each campaign (the My Account tab summarizes this for you).

These monitoring options let you get your campaigns running well (meaning they're making you the kind of profit you want), and will help you eliminate campaigns that don't perform—in other words, they help you fail fast and learn.

Once you have a campaign humming alone, the next step is to start another campaign or try to improve the performance of the one you have. You don't have to settle for tiny profits.