Best Way to Maintain Clustered Adgroups?

Bid Management Software?

[mrclark]

Now for all those that are using Adwords correctly, know that often it's better to put just 1 keyword into it's own Adgroup, should that keyword be generating enough impressions/clicks and maintaining these are simply a case of checking, noting any bid/ad changes and then knowing when to come back to check it again.

But when you cluster say 15-20 tightly themed keywords into just one Adgroup, what do you feel is the least time consuming and most efficient way to track these Adgroups and where to make a note of any keyword bid changes?

This is the only real area of my Adwords account that I feel I could improve a lot on, so any suggestions of how you maintain clustered Adgroups would be very much appreciated. The only way I'm thinking at the moment is just to note in software such as Excel, the bid change and when you did it (when I decrease bids I do so by 10-15%).

Is Bid Management Software the way to go for these?

[MadeWillis]

I make all my notes in Adwords Editor. There is a field for comments and I gind it very useful. I only wish there was a way to create "virtual ad groups" so that I could track changes I make based on factors scuh as data, percent increase/decrese, new ad copy, etc.

[mrclark]

Noting it in Adwords Editor isn't a bad shout to be honest.

How do you mean with the second part of your post, regarding virtual adgroup?

[MadeWillis]

I would like to be able to monitor changes that I make by creating virtual groupings of keywords. By virtual I mean not actaully moving the keywords from their current groups, rather just a list so that I can view mass changes that I make across several ad groups or campaigns.

Currently this is not possible, it's just something I would like to see.

[SanDiego Art]

Yes, some bid-management software programs allow you to "tag" your campaigns, adgroups, keywords, ads into virtual groupings. This way you could monitor "all ads that mention Free Shipping" or all terms with "coupon" in them; without actually physically structuring them in the same campaign or adgroup.

Programs that allow you to give more than 1 tag to an item are the best in my opinion as it gives you multiple ways to analyze your data.

Without using a bid-management application, you could hack around in Excel or a db, to keep a record of what adgroups/keywords belong to your virtual groups, then summarize the data using Pivot-tables or SQL. Pretty manual process, but it can be done.