large scale adwords campaigns - how?

how to manage tight adgroups

[golles]

we manage a fairly large adwords account (large by my standards) and I find it a struggle to manage the hundreds of adgroups we have across our campaigns while trtying to keep up with 'best practice' and have tightly focused adgroups with small volumes of high related keywords in each adgroup.

I know some of you guys/gals have what I would call monsterous accounts with hundreds of thousands if not millions of keywords.

My question is how do you do this in terms of keeping up with best practice account creation, testing, tracking etc?

I am still using adwords editor and the web interface - so I guess the main answer is using different tool sets, but even so the overhead must be immense.

Any pointers greatly appreciated.

[AussieWebmaster]

Initially you need to start with a portfolio approach but have decent enough tracking/analytics that you can isolate the individual words in the groups for conversion.

Once one or two words shoot ahead you create individual ad groups for them inside a valuables campaign