Think back to the first time you launched a large search campaign on Adwords. That’s when you might have first been hit with the cold harsh reality that no matter how careful you are in systematically structuring your new campaigns, the market ultimately decides what keywords, and in which order, mean something.

Let’s draw a quick portrait of a diligent affiliate bent on achieving success. Affiliate X builds a gigantic scale, intricately structured, beautifully logical campaign. One that includes broader terms at the top giving rise to even more clever and inspired variations underneath running down the list to a veritable gold-mine of ‘hyper-targeted’ phrases that include five keywords or more each. When they finally lay it all out in Excel, it is a monumentally colossal example of hierarchical spreadsheet beauty.

Then they actually launch it. On the first day Affiliate X notices that the thousands of permutations of keywords, logically and meticulously sorted into hundreds of granular adgroups, ended up all over the map in terms of traffic. Adgroups that they thought were going to generate low volume traffic exploded to the top, and variations they were sure would churn high-volume traffic actually tanked in the impressions list.

A month went by and still they could find no return on that original ‘ode to campaign organizational-awesomeness’.  Like almost every campaign, 10% of the adgroups (and likely mostly mid-tail terms not expected to do anything) are rocking 90% of the conversions.  And all that other keyword permutation magnificence? Most of it’s stuck wallowing in the bottom half of the campaign growing mould.

So what’s the wisdom here for the way you launch your new campaigns?

Simply put, a small campaign that’s up and online is worth way more than a massive campaign that sits in Excel forever while you tweak it to death. It’s often better to put a small campaign together that’s totally airtight, and at that point  just send it out into the wild. In the end it’s going to have fend for itself anyway, so why not simply do your best and then let Google-destiny decide the rest?

Besides, launching a massive amount of adgroups from the beginning also poses the challenge of managing your all-important CTRs on a brand new campaign. If you’ve got hundreds of adgroups to monitor after launch, it’s going to be really tough to keep track of all of them.

Google has said at several SMX shows and other Q&A sessions that they give you the benefit of the doubt for the first two weeks or so while they assess your campaign’s overall CTR performance. If during that first couple weeks your CTR performance can’t be effectively managed because your campaign is too large and unruly, the amount of traffic you’re able to generate will be hampered in the long term.

So while it’s possible that some affiliates have found their own way to manage massive new campaigns, for the majority simply getting a small campaign up and running and then growing it from there is the best road to success.