Once your campaign has been running for at least 3 days or has served 1,000 impressions (whichever comes first) then you should start “optimising” your campaign.
To do this, simply look at what your overall CTR is for the whole campaign, and then remove any individual element that doesn’t hit that CTR.
For example, if your campaign is running at a 5% CTR overall, then you should probably remove any keyword/site/ad which comes in below that (which has served over 1,000 impressions). If removing everything below 5% will make it hard to deliver your full budget, then consider only removing anything with a CTR below 3% to start with, and then move up to 5% later.
If you do this process every few days at first, and then every few weeks, and then every few months you will increase your CTR to it’s best possible average after a while.
It may take some time, and it may seem like you are wasting time by doing it this slowly, but if you are patient about it your long-lasting results will remain much better than if you just move all of your budget to your best performing keyword immediately.
WARNING: You should keep in mind volume when optimising your campaigns – if a keyword/site/ad is just below your CTR average threshold, but is providing a large amount of the impressions you deliver, it may be worthwhile to keep it going.
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