Getting a profitable campaign up and running is one thing, but keeping it profitable over the long term is even harder. It’s tempting to just set it and forget it, but if you want to keep you quality scores from slipping, campaigns require ongoing maintenance. I’ll be going into several of these maintenance techniques, to help you:
The topic for today is removing 0 impression keywords. Long tail keywords are great. They usually have super high CTRs, sometimes 100%. But the downside that you never hear people mention, is that if you have keywords that never get impressions it hurts your campaign. A keyword that just sits in your account without ever being searched for is just dead weight. It’s a tough call to determine how long you want to wait for those long tails impressions before removing the keywords.
Personally, I like to run a pretty tight ship. If a keyword hasn’t shown an impression in 3 months, it’s gone. This is fairly easy to do, but time consuming. Just check the ad group with the stat interval you want, sort by impressions, then delete everything with a 0. Doing this on a regular basis will purge the dead keywords from your campaign, and keep your quality scores high.
Yeah I used to do a lot of PPC to targeted pages on my niche sites and the majority of keywords I was bidding on got practically (and a lot of the time, literally) 0 impressions.
And this truly is the first time I’ve seen the downside mentioned publicly.
Very interesting! So, why is it that keywords that have no impressions lower the QS of ads? It doesn’t seem to make much sense.
It’s all about trial&error, about sticking with what’s working for you and getting rid of what’s not. Of course, it will require work on your part but it always pays off in the long run.
Alan Johnson
Yeah Chad, I’d like to hear more about the specifics of how this actually hurts us. Not that I don’t believe you – just interested.
Michal and Matt- From I have heard, and from our own testing results, one of the metrics of quality score has to do with the number of keywords in a campaign versus the number of keywords that result in clicks. Therefore it stands to reason if you have a lot of non-impression and non click keywords it will lead to an unfavorable ratio clicked keywords to non clicked.
It’s definitely common sense to assume that keywords without impressions/clicks hurt to a certain degree, even if not a lot.
Alan Johnson
Is this referring to Google and/or Yahoo? Both have a quality score/index value.
Its all about relevancy and 0 impressions after 3 months has to effect your quality score. Thanks Chad, its good to be reminded – looks like its spring cleaning time for my clients.
Well one thing is for certain, leaving dead keywords skews the CTR by having impressions that never get clicks. This is what will definitely cause Quality Score Issues. I question though if the impression count is Zero and the Clicks are Zero if it has that much of an effect.
The reality is though that we should always be ceaning up campaigns. If you aren’t it means you aren’t really paying attention to the numbers the way that you should be anyway.
Just got confirmation from Yahoo. While beating around the bush they said that you should move all lower performing keywords out of your campaigns and keep the higher performing ones together. Thus meaning…zero impressions/clicks does hurt your quality index. Google responded by saying “with regard to your AdWords quality score, your zero impression keywords have no bearing.” – I am still skeptical of this but at least we’ve been told straight from the Search Engines.
Thanks for posting that Anais. Good to know Yahoo is honest about it. I have proved through my own campaigns that dead keywords do affect QS whether they want to admit it or not.
RE: Just got confirmation from Yahoo. While beating around the bush they said that you should move all lower performing keywords out of your campaigns and keep the higher performing ones together.
Lower performing does not mean 0 impressions…if it’s performing at all then it’s not 0 impressions. 0 impressions have no bearing on performance – this is NOT accurate. taking out 0 impression will make you account more manageable – but does not affect quality.
Sure its the CTR that bears the brunt
if you’re not ready to delete the keywords with 0 impressions, why not just move them into another ZI (zero impressions) ad group…. then monitor it
for however long you think is necessary. Perhaps changing the ad text, bid/position may help in getting that keyword some impressions. Also, review your negative keyword list…. when new products/services are added to the site (and to your list of keywords), there may have been previous negative keywords preventing them from showing up.