When you decide to drop a campaign though, make decision based on how much you're spending on it. Not conversion rate.

When I first start a campaign, I'll often wait until I spend at least double my advertising budget with no sales before I consider dropping it. Maybe even triple my budget if I'm emotionally attached to it. ;-)

But if I haven't made any sales by then, I'll usually stop campaign. However, you may want to wait longer if you're willing to spend more money to see if it works. I think I'm probably more of a conservative.

At any rate, I *rarely* end a campaign before I get 300 clicks. 300 is typically minimum number of clicks before I feel I can judge whether a campaign will pay off. And I will generally only end it then if I've had *zero* sales.

Sometimes, though, you'll make a quick sale and get excited. But then you see few or no sales after that. If you find that you're consistently spending more than your budget for first few sales, then get ready to end it if you don't figure out how to make it better.

I want you to realize, too, that when you bid less on your keywords, you can afford to live with a lower conversion rate. But when you bid more, your conversion rate has to be higher to provide you with profit you want.

I've only talked about *starting* a PPC campaign so far. But sometimes, you may have a PPC campaign that's paying off, and then it starts choking and gasping for air after a while.

In that case, you need to decide when to pull plug and retire it. Otherwise, it may eat up all profits you've already made.

I'll usually be more lenient in this case. Since campaign has made me money in past, I'm more likely to give it benefit of doubt and keep it running. I don't know if that's a good idea or not. But sometimes, it's just hard to say goodbye to an old friend. After all, maybe it's just a temporary downturn.

But you still have to cut it off at some point. If I find myself breaking even (or even losing money) on each sale for any length of time, then I'll start thinking about ending campaign.

In our example here, if you notice that you've been spending $45 per sale lately, then start thinking about future of this campaign. Try to figure out what's changed and see if you can fix it.

How long should you wait before you abandon it? Two weeks? A month? Ten sales? A hundred sales?

It's completely dependent on your situation. If you make 20 sales a day, then obviously worrying after only 20 sales is unwarranted. On other hand, if it takes you 4 months to make 20 sales, then maybe you shouldn't wait quite that long. Listen to your gut.

In end, be aware that PPC management is not a rigid science. You have to use a certain amount of judgment. But try not to be emotionally attached. If a little voice in back of your head is telling you that you're spending too much for too little, then listen to it.

What I've given you here are guidelines based on my own practices. I'm sure there are other people who do it differently and are also successful. But these strategies work for me. And I'm sure you can adapt them to work for you.

health food health food recipes

But it wouldn't appear for phrases such as:

food that's bad for my health how food affects my health

According to Google's estimate, my ad would be (on average) 8.6 in list of all AdWord ads for that phrase. And I would receive approximately 12 clicks on my ad each day (on average).

Lastly, I can narrow relevance of my keyword phrase even more. I can enter it like this:

[health food]

This means that my ad will only appear if someone searches specifically for:

health food

And it won't appear for any other search terms. The search must include only those two words in that order. My ad will only appear for people who search for my keyword phrase exactly. So it won't appear if someone searches for phrases like:

health food recipes vegetarian health food

According to Google's estimate, my ad would be (on average) 8 in list of all AdWord ads for that phrase. And I would receive approximately 2.1 clicks on my ad each day (on average).

You can see that there are some significant differences in amount of traffic I would get from each of these different bids. In this case, I may do best by bidding on "health food". It would get me about 300 clicks a month more than [health food]. And it would get me about 90 clicks a month more than words without quotes.

And that's just for a single keyword phrase.

You may have noticed that term [health food] was still positioned about same as other two terms (a little better even). But it would have received *much* fewer clicks. This is probably because far fewer people search for health food without any other words.

So when you set up your next AdWords campaign (or when you check your current campaigns), you should check which of these methods will get you most clicks for some of your more popular keyword phrases.