PPC FAQ – When to Stop Using PPC Keywords

Elizabeth Marsten — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:00:00 +0000

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!

PPC FAQ – Finding the Right Number of Keywords

Elizabeth Marsten — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:00:00 +0000

I answered some questions about PPC keywords yesterday then realized that you might find these useful. I’ll keep posting PPC questions and answers over the next several days.

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 many PPC keywords should you buy?

Continuing the Portent PPC series, today’s insight is how to determine how many keywords you should have in any given ad group or campaign.

Ultimately, the actual number of appropriate keywords depends on your industry, but the rule of thumb is keep it simple and group PPC keywords related to your business appropriately.

One sure sign: if you have to run an Adwords Search Query Report every time you log into your Google account you’re most likely bidding on too many terms (unless you are Target or Amazon). If it’s in the hundreds, it’s too many.

Too many keywords!

High volume keywords can create several thousand impressions each day. Break them out into their own campaigns to control costs and ease maintenance. Some examples are real estate, lawyer, cars, jewelry, bridal, furniture, and shoes.

If you must bid on a difficult to control PPC keyword, place it in a separate campaign. Make sure that you actually need that keyword and that it converts. This way you can control costs, exposure and filter out low quality clicks and visits. Ideally, you want to have no more than 20-25 keywords in an ad group. This will make it easier to not only see all the keywords on a single page in the PPC search engine’s interface, but also keep things neat and increase quality score potential.

Portent» PPC Keyword List

PPC FAQ – When to Stop Using PPC Keywords

How do you know which PPC keywords to stop using?

PPC FAQ – Finding the Right Number of Keywords

How many PPC keywords should you buy?