How long do I test a group of keywords?

I'd like to make money this year :)

[UCFShimmie]

hi! i'm a noob, but tried to read every recent thread in this section to keep from ticking anyone off ... y'all seem so wonderfully helpful that i'd love if you could give me some imput...

my situation:

i've been trying to spend $100 a day on about 20 keyword phrase variations of "widget" with maximum bid of $1.25. i ran my campaign from Friday 9 a.m. to Monday 9 a.m. to test the waters. i've only spent about $18 a day!

my average CTR was 0.7%, with keywords ranging from 0% to 10%. at this point i'm eliminating keywords with 0.5% CTR and below to get a more focused grouping.

my questions:

1. how many impressions should a keyword have before it is evaluated for effectiveness? are there any impression benchmarks? is three days enough? am i running too soon?

2. should i keep keywords with lower than 0.5% CTR? that would leave me with only five or so words ... and many of those words under 0.5% had less than 100 impressions! but one CT on those words would put them above 1.0%.

3. if i need a longer initial campaign to determine my keywords' effectiveness, how often should i tweak copy or delete poor performers?

i don't want to spend six months trying to make money, so consider me a sponge. thanks!

stephanie

[gsx]

1 Google evaluates on last 1000 impressions. Three days enough? No.

2 Google disable keywords with less than 0.5% automatically (after 1000 impressions of the whole campaign group)

3 Dont tweak copy much. Tweak keywords and use exact/negative matching facilities to get a good clickthrough rate. You can create more than one advert copy per campaign group, Google rotates them and gives you a clickthrough percentage. You can simply delete those that dont perform.

[hannamyluv]

Here, read these threads. They should help.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[webmasterworld.com...]

The great thing about adwords (and the internet in general) is you can usually get a read in as little as a day. Try seperating your keywords out into different adgroups. Each adgroup should have a main keyword and a few variations (i.e. mispellings, extended phrases, etc. Use the overture suggestion tool or wordtracker for help.) You should average out around 6 - 10 keyword phrases per adgroup based on this. Focus the copy of each ad on that one keyword. Try a few different copies based on different approaches to copy (hard sell, soft sell, informational or exciting, just to give you an idea) Give it a day or two to see which copy performs best (as explained above) and delete the underperformer.

[Robert Scott]

For my keywords Friday 9 a.m. to Monday 9 a.m. is the worst time of the week.

Monday 9am to Wednesday 9pm is about 4 times better.