Adwords help please

Wasted money on professional service

[burcot]

For 14 months I have plugged away on adwords.
My site (ecommerce) is only 14 months old, so in the beginning - every sale could be attributed to adwords.
The conversion cost was approx 4% of turnover.

Now the site is ranking, (and i am not the best at implementing coversion tracking) i thought maybe i should use a professional to manage the adword campaign.

Since hiring a so called pro, sales have fallen.
Every week i receive a progress report, and the thing that stands out - is the ctr. Whilst managing my own campaign the ctr was 9.5%, it is now 1.8%

I am seeing click through phrases in the stats like... small thin blue widgets - even though i only sell fat red widgets

Basically, the reason for this post is - can anyone point me to a brilliant alround thread on the basics of adwords? cos it looks as though (as usual) if you want anything doing right, do it yourself

Cheers

Mark

[macker123]

I would HIGHLY recommend you pay some money and buy one of the Adwords eBooks out there. There are a couple that are brilliant that will help you know how to do this properly and a few tips that most people do not know about. I have read many books and they are brilliant.

[edited by: eWhisper at 2:06 pm (utc) on Feb. 27, 2006]
[edit reason] Please no specifics. [/edit]

[eWhisper]

[webmasterworld.com...]

That's a good thread to start.

There's also the AdWords Library:
[webmasterworld.com...]
that has the best of the best threads in it.