I recently attended an AdWords Advanced seminar conducted by search industry leader, author and certified Google AdWords trainer Brad Geddes.  The seminar section I attended was geared towards search marketing professionals and put an emphasis on advanced conversion techniques.

Some of the information was reinforcement of paid search campaign best practices, but Brad also discussed a few detailed strategies, as well as overarching commonalities of the best run Google AdWords search campaigns worldwide.

Here are five of my key takeaways from the day:

1. Apply the same principles for evaluating any ad campaign to evaluating online ad campaigns.  Setting specific goals for each online campaign is essential to evaluating it’s success.

2. Consider the lifetime value of a customer when determining your cost-per-acquisition goals.

3. Conversion rates for ads in the top three positions are NOT significantly better than other first page positions.

4. Scheduling is underutilized as a way to maximize return on investment.  When are your customers shopping?  When are they buying?  What time of month are they buying?  What time of week are they buying?  What time of day are they buying?

5. Test, test, and test again.  Test your ads.  Test your landing pages.  Test your ecommerce funnels.  Test.

My overall takeaway is that there is no limit to the amount of time that can be spent tweaking Google AdWords campaigns to move closer to your goals or improving your margins, though at some point it becomes an issue of diminishing returns.  However, if you or your agency has reached its goals, consider updating them.

It’s a matter of leading or falling behind.