I answered some questions about PPC keywords last week then realized that you might find these useful.

Ask your own question in the comments. Depending on how many questions I receive I’ll answer either all or the best ones in future blog posts.

How do you know which PPC keywords to stop using?

Rolling right along in our series of often asked PPC questions, is the ever popular, should I pause it, delete it or keep it going? As with any PPC account, you’re bound to find some “bleeders”, those terms that just suck up clicks and money but make no conversions. It’s important to go through your ad groups often, cross check against your analytics and clean those keywords out.

Start here: if the keyword is racking up a lot of impressions, but no clicks, check the match type. You may need to refine how many times it’s showing up and why no one is clicking on it. Try searching on it yourself and see what comes up. If you’re not as relevant, consider deleting it or turning it into a long tail keyword and add qualifiers in front of or on back of that keyword to increase the relevancy to searchers.

Whoa! Time to change this keyword up!

This also applies if the keyword is getting lots of clicks, but no sales, leads or has a high bounce rate. Check your analytics. When searchers click through to your site and leave immediately, this is telling you that they are not finding what they are looking for and therefore that keyword is not very relevant. When in doubt, pause the keyword and see what happens. See if your conversions/leads/traffic picks up. You may find that by releasing that bit of budget that it was spending; is now being allocated to other keywords that turn out to be more profitable to you.

And last, but not least, how long should you wait while the stats pile up? This is going to be a case by case decision. If you are able to garner thousands of impressions overnight, then you will be able to act on that data pretty immediately, if anything, you should, just to control the costs. Ideally a full week at minimum is best to let the keyword get a chance of being seen or searched on enough times and to factor in for the different peaks of days of the week and times of day.

Happy keyword refining!