When it comes to your marketing efforts, it's impressive how often the 80/20 rule....rules. That is 80% of production comes from just 20% of the total source. This could mean 80% of your affiliate sales come from 20% of your affiliates or 80% of content views on your site are from only 20% of your pages.
In my experience, the rule is often closer to a 95/5 rule. This is especially true from the AdWords campaigns I have run. You can have 1000's of optimized ad groups, but the reality is only a select few of your keywords are actually the ones converting. If this is the case for your AdWords campaign, and I bet it is, doesn't it make sense to spend the majority of your budget on those keywords? More importantly, doesn't it make sense to do everything you can to make sure that your ads are being triggered when your top converting keywords are searched?
AdWords makes it simple to keep your most successful keywords above your competitors. Just go to your keyword tab and sort by Status. The keywords below the first page estimate will be sorted at the top. I highly recommend that you go through your keywords, especially your top converting keywords, and making sure that you are bidding them up to the first page estimate. In fact, if the cost per click and cost per conversion makes sense on a CPA basis, I would bid the amount AdWords recommends in their above the search results estimate.
If you're running a campaign with numerous keywords, I also recommend placing your top converting ad groups into a separate campaign. That way it's even easier to keep track of your most successful keywords and to keep those bids at a level where your ads are showing up. Otherwise you're missing out on a number of conversion opportunities.
