Strategy to adjust bids

Keyword level or adgroup level?

[lazerbud]

Hi,

Say I have an Adwords account consisting of 20 Ad Groups and over 50,000 keywords.

What in your experience has been the best optimization technique - Adjusting bids at the ad group level or at the keyword level?

In some ad groups I have keywords that are low performing although the ad group as a whole is performing well. I am tempted to adjust bids at the keyword level but my agency and SEM partners advise me to persist with low performing keywords.

Please share best strategies.

Thanks

[beesticles]

Yes, you should be adjusting bids at keyword level (I presume you're tracking by keyword). 20 adgroups is not a lot for 50,000 keywords, so you by bidding at adgroup level you could be really missing a lot of valuable traffic by not bidding good keywords up, and buying poor traffic by not bidding bad keywords down. I dare say you've got good and bad keywords all mixed up in the same adgroups.

Spending time on this could really get you better returns on your investment. If your SEM agency disagrees then fire them, they don't know what they are talking about.