Managing a profitable PPC campaign is a time consuming task. As a SEM or SEO professional, we all have limited time due to the massive amounts of changes, projects and reporting that consumes our day. Thankfully we have tools such as Kenshoo, ClickEquations, Marin or even Excel that can help us shift through the data and spend time on the keywords that generate the most traffic, cost and revenue.

These keywords are called ‘Head Keywords’. These head keywords are the driving force behind your PPC campaigns. Usually, these top performing keywords are the 20% of your keyword list that generates 80% of your sales.

How you define your head keywords can be based on your business model and the type of tracking you have available. If you are a e-commerce store you will want to focus on the keywords that bring in the most sales, while if you are a new site you will want to focus on the keywords that bring in the most page views or time on site. Other business models such as lead generators may want to focus on things such as revenue generated or overall profit.

Since your head keywords often cost you the most money and are responsible for most of your sales/revenue. It is important to spend time focusing on these keywords, adjusting their bids, testing ad text and search query mining the keywords that are on broad match. If you have your account properly structured, you should be able to navigate through your campaigns and ad groups quickly to find these keywords.

Don’t forget that Adwords has filtering options at the keyword level and you can filter by impressions, clicks, conversion and cost. This is an extremely easy way to take a look at what keywords are the drivers in your campaign.

While long-tail keywords can be profitable, they do not spend as much money and will not need as much attention as your head keywords. So make sure everyday you log into Adwords you are monitoring your head keywords performance.