How does Adwords work?

Campaigns, Keywords, Site targeted, Content Match, Pauses

[zebracobra]

I have been using Adwords for three years now and never have know how it works. I set up some keywords to go with an ad back in 2003 and sales went through the roof almost instantly. Ever since that initial setup I never needed to make changes to my account (I even lost my password for six months), everything was just dandy. Fast forward 2006 and sales from Adwords plummeted to near 0! Obviously Google changed something and my original setup stopped working for some reason, but the thing is that I don't know much about Adwords to fix my problem. When I search on the net for a crash course on Adwords every result is someone selling information, so I hope someone here has some extra time to answer a few questions that might help me and others to be more competitive.

My Adwords is set up as one Campaign with one Adgroup that contains 100 keywords and 5 ads, that's it.

Campaign #1
\
\-----Ad Group #1
\
\------Sole Ad & list of keywords

I have a major problem with this because every time I change an ad or set of keywords my campaign stops bringing in any good amount of traffic for 2-5 days. I have read that if I create separate Ad Groups I can have them all running and only the one that I changed will go off line, so it would be:

Campaign #1
\
\-----Ad Group #1
\ \
\ \------Ad & list of keywords (off line)
\
\-----Ad Group #2
\
\-----Ad & list of keywords (on line)

Can anyone confirm that this is correct?

I have a feeling that the entire campaign will be paused and not just the Ad group, meaning that we need to create separate Campaigns and not Adgroups, something like:

Campaign #1
\
\-----Ad Group #1
\
\------Ad & list of keywords (off line)

Campaign #2
\
\-----Ad Group #1
\
\------Ad & list of keywords (on line)

Now if I create separate campaigns or ad groups, do I use the same keywords in both of them?

Do the Adwords experts do it like this:

Campaign #1
\
\-----Top CTR Keywords
\
\------Ad & list of top ctr keywords

Campaign #2
\
\-----Top Conversion Keywords
\
\------Ad & list of top conversion keywords

Making sure that keywords are not repeated in the campaigns?

Before early spring I was averaging 20-30 conversions per day and mostly from the content network, then that specific traffic almost completely disappeared, so I went ahead and deleted the old campaign and created a new one to go with the updated web page, but content traffic is still not coming. Before the changes, when searching for my website on the Google engine it would give me 10,500 results of websites that contained my ad, now after the change only 1,400 sites have my ad, could I have wrecked my history by deleting my old campaign?

I am a bit worried that traffic is coming in by the hundreds but not buying anything, why are they sending me different traffic comparing to pre-spring?

Is Analytics any good?

I don't mind anyone highjacking this thread to ask related and newbie questions.

[running scared]

Looks like your drop in traffic is related to going through editorial. Ads that haven't passed editorial will only show on Google and not the rest of the partner network which can account for substantial traffic. Once you pass, your traffic increases again.

Tip 1: If you want to change an advert, add the new one in as a new advert and run both ads for a week. You can then come back and delete the old one.

Tip 2: Take at least your top ten key phrases and create separate adgroups for each of the phrases. Make the advert in each adgroup targeted to the key phrase in question. This will increase your campaigns performance enormously.

Tip 3: Read very widely in this forum, there is masses of high quality free information. You could start in the forums library.