The worst Adwords account I have ever seen

mis-managed is an understatement ...

[Shak]

A very good friend of mine spends about £500 a month on Adwords in a not too competetive arena.

avg cpc is £0.08 with a 3.0% CTR

however trust me when I say that its a total mess in there along the lines of :

Campaign #1
Campaign #2
Campaign #3
Campaign #4
Campaign #5
Campaign #6

same applies for adgroups.

all keywords are BROAD match.

all are set to Content Target ON

NO ROI tracking script of any shape or form is being used.

creatives are very bad.

many keywords are disabled etc

so at this point you are wondering about the 3% CTR right?

so you should, as he obviously is doing something right, and that is, BEING ONLINE in an industry where most of his competitors are not.

anyway I have given the task to 1 of Europe's best PPC bid managers to do the following:

1, Use this account as a training manual/show case for staff and clients of what NOT to do.

2, Optimise it, so we can really kick some ass.

3, have a good old laugh at it :)

and if my friend is reading this, sorry mate, too good not too share.

I was gonna send it over to AWA and Google Hq to take a loook at, but then decided against it.

shall keep you informed

Shak

[irish_john]

I think mine is definitely ALOT worse :)

[Robino]

I've seen some poorly managed Adwords accounts. Not too far off from what Shak found today.

Many small businesses jumped in, set up the accounts and never looked back. They know it's sending leads and that's all that matters to them.

I'm glad there are accounts set up like this. It makes me look better when I can reduce a company's spending and at the same time increase the leads/sales.

Campaign #1
Campaign #2
Campaign #3

You can blame that on GOOGLE! Until about six months ago, you had to create the campaign and then (if you knew how to) go back and name it. And I believe that was also true for naming the Ad groups.

[eWhisper]

If we're sharing war stories...

I got a call last week - 'My ad isn't showing'.

So of course, I went through the reasons in the thread here.

None of the reasons applied.

Took a look at the account and realized that thread missed one very key element.

There were 0 ads - just lists of keywords.

DOH!

[sem4u]

I have taken over a few shockers.

£2.00 CPC reduced to £0.29.

Broad match and content targeting were on - now switched off. A few hundred keywords added.

No tracking - tracking now in place.

[edit_g]

I've never taken anything that bad over but a very big player whom I compete with has had every single ad going to his splash page (not even the homepage, I'm talking an 'enter' button and 4 or 5 clicks to the products). Long may that continue...

[Gmorgan]

I currently use content targeting and broad matching. Why are these such bad things?

(I am a provider of specialised B2B software)

[anallawalla]

Content targetting and broad matching are fine if you have been through the exercise for each keyword and know why and when you should use them.

They are talking about novices who don't know about exact and phrase match or the reasons for not using content and search partners.

I am about to split my campaigns into two, one for content and the other for search, because I have good conversions for both but not across the board.

e.g. I have a broad term "widget" which costs me a lot in irrelevant clicks but is still the biggest converting term (and needs to be subsidised by terms with better CPAs). Closer examination has shown that most conversions come from the content targetting. So, this one belongs in a campaign where I turn it on. In other cases, I am in #1 position for content but very low in search because the term is competitive in search but not many use content. Splitting the campaigns would let me bid lower for content.