Too many times I have seen business owners trying to create and manage paid advertising account in Google Adwords, without having a good sense what rules they should follow to easily and successfully manage a PPC campaign.

Here are three fundamentals laws of PPC management:

1. Don’t waste time with online interface(s)

Setup the campaign online and download the Adwords Editor to manage the campaigns on your desktop. This will save you tremendous time, by not waiting for web pages to load, by the usability of find and sort functions of GAE (Google Adwords Editor), by customizable views and multiple updates on the account and many others you don’t have online.

If I would have to restrict the 3 laws to just one, this will be it.

2. Think globally, act locally

It was supposed to be the other way round, but for managing your PPC accounts you need to start small, and then evolve. Constrain the budget for your campaigns, so you can get maximum 25 clicks a day. Start a test campaign with a single product type or service, one ad group, limit the number of keywords to 10-15 and place them in phrase match and exact match only (no broad match yet, baby).

3. Get intimate with MS Excel

This is a must also. Once you will add more keywords to the account, you will need to analyze data in manner of thousands of rows of data and columns. At least you should become good with sorting functions, conditional formatting and as an Excel guru that you’ll be, you will get to dream of pivot tables.

I could add to this another two important rules:

1. If you don’t want to waste money and time in the beginning, avail the services of a consultant and ask them questions as you learn it by yourself
2. If you manage tens of thousands of keywords and $50K+ budgets, you may want to have access to a bid management tool (at this moment, I don’t believe rules-based tools are offering much value, go for portfolio-based tools, but try to understand what they mean by portfolio first)

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