1st make sure you are tracking conversions.  You can track leads, sales and revenue amount.

Then look at your impression share % for each campaign & ad group.  This will let you know what share of impressions you are currently receiving, and you can derive what budget you should have to receive 100% impression share. Since you are not increasing your bids, you should receive similar performance as you increase your budget. ...CPC, CPA,CPL metrics.

Next step is to improve your text ads..the higher your CTR, the more clicks you will receive, which will increase budget  ...however this will also increase your quality score, and lower your CPC.   Quality Score takes weeks/months to improve, its not an overnight improvement.  Focus on increasing Click Thru Rate & Quality Score and you will increase spend, while your campaigns perform better.

Competitor campaigns work very well.  Just make sure you are targeting a competitor offering a similar product.

Brian gives good advice...I structure my competitor campaigns similarly..separate campaign...separate groups for each competitor.  Be careful about Dynamic Keyword Insertion....I've used it before in competitor campaigns, and it generated high CTR, but also generated complaints.  I do not use DKI for competitor campaigns any longer.

I found that I can get high CTR if I show why my product is great, not focused on my brand or my competitor.  ie. I will use Coke vs Pepsi in an example.  If I am Pepsi, and I am targeting keyword of "Coke"... My text ads would say thing like, Cold Refreshing Soda, Summer Soda Sale, Refreshing Beverage, #1 Taste Test Winner, Caffeine Free Beverage, etc.  Focus on the product, not the brand.  Why is the customer looking for this product? They are thirsty... show how your product can help the customer...they will click on your ad and buy your product.

My competitor campaigns perform very well...they are a great way to gain market share.

If you want to keep things simple, just go into settings and add more countries to your targeted locations.  However if you want to be able to control separated budgets & bids for each country, I recommenced that you have separate campaigns for each country.  Just create a new campaign, copy/paste your current keywords & text ads into the new campaign.  This will allow you to have separate budgets & bids for each country, which should result in better performing campaigns.   I also recommend that you exclude countries that you are not targeting (both the high risk countries you mentioned, and other countries that you do not want to target).

If you want to make your campaign perform even better, I recommend that you take advantage of the enhanced campaigns 'bidding by location'.  This will allow you to +/- bids based on location.  For example if you have a higher conversion in 1 city, you will want to increase keyword bids in that city.  To be able to achieve this, you need to be targeting lots of cities, not just the entire country.  It will take some time to add all of the major cities in a country, but this will allow you to +/- bids for each city, which is a major improvement.

Hi Meghan,

If you want to change bidding by location, you will first need to add lots of cities to your campaign.  Then let the campaign run for a while, so you can accumulate data for each city.  Once you have clicks & conversions for several cities, you will be able to make decisions about conversion rates for each city.  Does this make sense?

After time goes by and you have enough data, just click on the campaign >>  settings>>>  locations.  Do you see the column 'bid adjustment"?  This is where you +/- bids for that location.

Branden