For the Record:
In October of 2010 I brought my son Michael into help me clean up and improve my Google adwords campaign.
I had a giant campaign that includes 72,500 keywords spread out over 3 unique geographic regions. The structure was built once and never optimized. It was working, but I knew it was full of waste and many opportunities were waiting to be discovered and worked.
In all, Michael has made 6,636 different changes to the account (Google tracks all changes with a tool called "Change history"). Here's how we got there:
Mike's 1st mission was to sweepout thousands of dead keywords, then build a strong negative keywords list, then he upgraded all the ads, optimized content (w/liberal DKI use), re-wrote all landing page URLs, worked the site link extensions and pulled out every trick in the book to improve CTR. Our net result is some of the most creative, hard working adwords ads in the USA.
Mike took us from 4,500 clicks p/mo to 7,900 (July 10 vs July 11). Our Click Thru rate went from 1.6% to 6.1%. Our CPC was $1.45 and fell to $1.25 So our Google Ad traffic went up nearly 80%, yet spent only 50% more. On a 6figure spend, thats ROI!