I've been looking through my keywords and seeing that for some keywords for example the phrase version has had no impressions, clicks, nothing whatsoever. Would you delete say the phrase version of a keyword, keeping the broad and exact or would you leave it 'just in case'. I've been looking at this campaign since June 21st 07 so its had a fair chance to get some impressions and clicks etc. My gut feeling is to get shot just incase it interferes with the performing broad and exact versions. I use one group (broad, exact, phrase) per adgroup by the way.
As a general rule, I wait a month, and if a keyword has no impressions, I delete it. My thinking is that if it averages less than 1 impression per month, then even with a clickthrough rate of 10%, it'd still generate less than 1 click per year, and a couple of conversions per century. So it's too small to care about... This conflicts with my suggestions to create and analyse the long-tail en-masse (since one term like this may not be worthwhile, but 1000 of them combined may be)...
Thanks for that CM. So you judge it as by zero impressions in a month no matter whether its a broad, exact or phrase - if the broad and exact have impressions but the phrase doesn't you'd still delete just the phrase?
I would. Of course, I'm constantly trying to get zero impressions on the broad match and phrase match by either putting them on exact or negative match (good for the QS). But I've never managed it yet...