The Google AdWords Help Forum, is a great resource for those of you with AdWords campaigns, as Google posts various tips every couple of weeks or so.

AdWordsPro Sarah, who is a Google employee, is a regular contributor to the forum. Her latest help came in the form of tips for testing keywords for products with low traffic.

Here are the 3 main tips:
1) Start Small. The knee jerk reaction is to throw a million keywords at the wall and see what sticks. The problem with this is that it is hard to manage this many keywords. A keyword may have terrible performance, but it gets lost in the crowd and you may never notice. It’s fine to use the ‘throw and stick’ method, but I like to throw small batches of keywords at the wall so I can carefully monitor their performance.

2) Delete Delete Delete. If you test a large number of keywords and they don’t perform well, they start to drag down your account Quality Score. And, to make matters worse, having a low account Quality Score, makes it harder to introduce new keywords (they tend to start with a lower Quality Score in a low Quality account). To avoid this, I recommend that low performing keywords be deleted immediately. If you have 100-200 impressions and no clicks, its time to think about deleting. If you have 200-300, it really is time. Advertisers tend to think if they wait just a little longer, a click will come. However, while they wait, the keyword drags down the account. If you want to test a lot of keywords, you have to be willing to give the non performers the ax.

3) Go Local. If you think your product might appeal to a local audience (a new umbrella hat- why not target Seattle), you can use location targeting to help get your ad in front of the right people. If you can’t rely on the search as heavily, you need to think about all of the other tools that are available for targeting. Who would want this product? Where do they live? When are they online? If you think your target audience is suburban moms, you might want to stay out of the city and try scheduling your ads during the day when they are at home.

AdWordsPro Sarah also has some suggestions on using Google content network for low traffic keywords. You can check them out here.

If you think that you can provide advice and answers to questions posted by AdWords users, then feel free to pop over to the Google AdWords Help Forum and share your knowledge.