I wont waste your time. These techniques are for slightly more advanced users. I will go straight to specifics.

Rescue Technique #1
Always use keywords matching options. Using broad match, exact phrase match and exact matching will result in different costs, different click through and ultimately different results. Generally, I would recommend setting all 3 matching all options to test and see which works best.

Rescue Technique #2
Research your keywords. Do a thorough research if your audience/customer, competitors, product/content and keywords. Armed with this knowledge select keywords that are most relevant to your product/content with reasonable demand and some competition (not an overly saturated one)

Rescue Technique #3
Use Adwords adgroups. How do you do this? Take for example, chicken soup base and recipes for chicken broth. These are 2 distinct phrases yet they are referring to the same product. If you group them under the same adgroup and dump all the keywords in, this would reduce click through rates and drive costs up. Instead set up an ad group just for recipes for chicken broth and in this group can be other words like recipes for mango cream broth and the other group will have words like vegetable soup base etc