Do you remove keywords that dont recieve many impressions/clicks? In other words if you have a word that people dont really seem to search on do you delete the word or just leave it in your campaign in case someone does decide to search that weird search term? Is there any advantages/disadvantages to doing it either way? Thanks guys!
No, I remove keywords that don't have conversions. As long a word/phrase is converting it stays regardless of how many impressions/clicks it gets.
What about specifically a keyword that, after say three days of testing gets 0 impressions. Leaving it there has no cost, but is there a negative to having it there? Will Google penalize you in some way? I'm thinking, for instance, of misspellings, etc.
Thats an interesting question and pretty much what I was trying to ask. Im sure that there is no negative effect considering 0 impressions and 0 clicks is a 100% CTR but as far as optimization and simplicity goes I wonder if there is harm in having those ads there.
What about "inactive for search"? I tend to leave 'em in, in case my quality goes up. Any downside there?
Nope. If you're opted in the content network you'll still get content impressions from those words/phrases as well.
I have always thought that ad position was dependent on bid and CTR. I have always removed keywords with a CTR lower than 1.2%. Maybe I am mistaken and would appreciate further comments on this. I THINK my system works (to at least a certain degree) as my ads appear above my competitors despite a MUCH lower bid on the same words
Ad positioning is based on the quality score. The quality score takes into account a number of elements including your bid (actual and/or max). The thing to keep in mind is that the quality score is assigned at the keyword level - not at the ad group or campaign level. One or more keywords having a poor quality score has no impact on other keywords within the same account.
GuyfromChicago Thanks very much for this - it has made me re-investigate. The information I have read before said it was evaluated at Adgroup level. Are you 100% sure as if you are I will put back all my low CTR keywords - if they are doing no harm I might as well keep them. Sorry to question this but I need to be certain before I put them back. The link you have provided to the Google quality score page refers to determining the minimum bid and not to the position the ads themselves will achieve.
you could always just place the suspect keywords in their own campaign - my view with google is you never know what they are doing so I like to be more safe than sorry. You could also email the adwords team and get a direct answer.
Thats good advice Dan - I did this and put the previously deleted keywords into a new adgroup and will wait and see. I did actually email google about this some time ago but their reply was effectively that they didn't want to disclose the minutae of their ad ranking system which I suppose makes sense.
I actually misspell some of the key words that I know people are likely to misspell, in that case if someone does get it wrong, my ad is sometimes the only one there.
I used to use Adwords, but don't anymore since our website is the top overall ranked website in Oregon for our profession. But when I used adwords, I'd leave in any word that would not penalize me. For example, "Portland tree surgeon" is rarely used, with "Portland Certified Arborist" being more common. But.............. if two people per year used "tree surgeon" and if we nailed down both of those customers, that keyword could yield work into the thousands of dollars. So I monitored keywords for up to a year before I thought about deletions. Because 50 rarely used terms, all added together, could bring in a lot of work between them by the year's end. Especially when combined with the popular keywords.