How Not To Delete A Bad Keyword
Posted by Steve Baker on Monday, February 1st, 2010 in Adgroups, PPC, PPC Campaigns
In a nutshell, my approach to managing my Ad groups has always been to group similar keywords together, and if I see a subset of these keywords performing differently, split them into their own Ad group.
For example, if I was advertising Sony Digital Cameras, I may include…
- Cheap Sony Digital Camera
- Cheap Sony Digital Cameras
- Sony Digital Camera
- Sony Digital Cameras
… all in the same Ad group (Ok – I wouldn’t, but for the sake of this example, suppose that I did).
If, after a month, I noticed that the conversion rate on ‘Cheap Sony Digital Camera’ and ‘Cheap Sony Digital Cameras’ was much lower, then I would split out these keywords into a separate Ad group. I would then assign them their own bid and advert, providing that they had enough traffic to justify their own Ad group (if they were generating almost no clicks, or they were generating a lot of clicks, but no sales, I may simply decide to remove them completely).
In the above case, I decide to remove them. What’s the result?
If I was using Exact Match only, then I have no problems – the keywords are removed, and my adverts don’t appear for these searches.
But if I’ve got my keywords on Phrase Match, all that will happen is that when somebody searches for ‘Cheap Sony Digital Camera’, my advert will appear, assigning the traffic to ‘Sony Digital Camera’ (Phrase Match).
If you delete a keyword from an Ad group, make sure that you have no other keywords that will catch it on Phrase or Broad Match. If possible, add it in as a Negative Match, to be on the safe side.
Of course, if in the above example, I had decided to move the ‘Cheap’ keywords to a new Ad group, and reduce the bids, I’m liable to get the same result. If the Phrase Match has a significantly higher bid, you are liable to see the clicks appear against this, and your new Ad group with the lower bids will be irrelevant.
So whenever you move a group of keywords to a new Ad group, make sure that the old Ad group doesn’t end up picking up the traffic – use Negative Matching at Ad group level. If you are removing a keyword from the whole campaign, it’s probably best to use Negative Matching at Campaign level.
You need to be especially careful when you have a particularly important keyword in its own Ad group, on Exact and Phrase Match. If you need to split the two versions into separate Ad groups, then you have to put a Negative Exact Match in the Phrase Match Ad group.
