by There are lots of reasons to clean your PPC keywords. Some of them can be:
Beginning of a season
Ending of special offer
Poor Performance
Irrelevant Traffic
Failed Experiments
And the list goes on and on.
PPC Keyword cleanup is not a rare phenomenon. It’s part of PPC management.
[bctt tweet=”Keyword research is the most important element of PPC.” username=”adstriangle”]
Keyword Research is the act of trying to find the right keyword or keywords that will help you rank ahead in search engines.
Therefore, for better results on PPC, it is important to bid on the right keyword because keyword relevancy determines the quality score.
Everything needs some kind of refinement at regular intervals and so does PPC keywords.
You can read a good article on keywords research at Moz- Beginners Guide to keyword research
After running your PPC campaigns for few weeks, your account needs refinement for optimization. All you need to is sort out unnecessary things that have collected in the past.
There are a lot of things that you need to clean up regarding PPC but in this post, we focus on keywords.
1. Clean Your Account Structure
The very first thing to start cleaning is your Account Structure.
Though this can be a very tiresome and uninteresting part but to make sure that your account remains fruitful, you need to perform this task.
Scan and examine your ad groups and PPC campaigns. Analyze their performance.
If you find that some ad campaigns are underperforming or not bringing any value then stop them straightway.
If you manage large accounts then probably this will be the most difficult task for you.
Once you are done with this, move ahead to reorganizing your campaigns and categorizing your groups.
[bctt tweet=”Reorganize your PPC account and categorize your groups for better performance.” username=”adstriangle”]
Make sure that each ad group has appropriate and matching keywords so that when the keywords are used in a search, the ads that are shown matches to them.
Visitors are most likely to convert if they find a similarity between the search query and advert.
Moreover, place your top-performing and best keywords in separate ad groups and create targeted copy for each.
You can read this post to know more on How to Structure Google Adwords account.
2. Organize your Keyword Lists
After cleaning your account structure, the next step is to organize your Keyword lists.
To guarantee effective running of your PPC campaigns, you need to focus on the types of keywords and the keyword lists that you have created.
[bctt tweet=”Remove keywords that are outdated, underperforming, receiving no/low impressions.” username=”adstriangle”]
These keywords can have an adverse impact on the overall Quality Score (QS) of the ad campaign in the long run.
In every 30 days, try to clean up inactive keywords who have failed to generate traffic or impressions.
A good strategy for effective bidding is to bid highest for exact matches, then for phrase matches and lastly for broad matches.
By doing this, you will be bidding highest for most relevant searches.
After eliminating unnecessary keywords, start testing new keywords by the help of competitor research.
Since new keywords are always arising, so it is important to be updated with the keyword trend.
After identifying new keywords put them into ad groups.
Revisit your long term keywords and discover those that have a track record of conversion.
The addition of these keywords will improve your conversions as well as Cost per Acquisition.
3. Clear Seasonal Keywords
Clearing seasonal keywords is very important for B2C accounts. But it should be implemented in B2B accounts as well.
If you are running a B2C Ecommerce store or are into a B2C industry, and letting your seasonal keywords run outside the seasonal holidays. You will probably drain your PPC Budget.
While clearing your seasonal keywords, pause all the keywords that are inappropriate to the current season.
Quickly review seasonal keywords and pause those keywords that are not being searched anymore.
While pausing irrelevant keywords, think again about your budget allotment.
For example, when the winter season gets over, you can pause the keyword “winter woolen caps” and instead redirect your resources to currently trending keywords like “spring hats”.
4. Adding Negative Keywords
A negative keyword is that type of keyword that prevents your ad from being shown by certain word or phrase.
Adding the right negative keywords enhances PPC profits significantly.
In our previous blog, we wrote about how to use negative keywords effectively.
In order to add the negative keywords, you need to execute a detailed search analysis in 15 days, 30 days, 60 days and 90 days time span to decide on the targeted keywords.
After jotting down the keywords that attract a non-targeted audience, negative match these keywords at the ad group, campaign, and the account level.
By using negative keywords, you can effectively control who can see your ad. Thus, you can ensure that you aren’t paying for irrelevant clicks.
By adjusting your negative keywords, you will increase the visibility of your ad to the interested people thus leading to more conversions.
Negative keywords act as a shield to protect your Ads from irrelevant clicks.
It increases the CTR, the conversion and improves the Quality Score.
5. Remove Duplicate Keywords
Duplicate Keywords are not recommended as they degrade the performance of your PPC campaigns.
The main problem of having duplicate keywords in different ad groups is that it creates internal competition.
You land up bidding against yourself, increasing your Cost per Clicks and reducing your Quality Score.
When you perform PPC cleanup, check for duplicate keywords. Either pause the keyword that has lowest conversions out of the two or simply remove it.
You can use duplicate keywords in the following cases:
- When you are serving ads with different geographical locations.
- When you are serving ads with different match types.
- When you are serving ads with different networks.
6. Deleting Low-Quality Score Keywords
Quality Score measures the quality of your ad, keywords, and landing page.
[bctt tweet=”The Higher relevance of your ad means higher Quality Score for you.” username=”adstriangle”]
But there are certain keywords that restrict you from getting a high-Quality Score.
Keyword Quality Score has a significant influence on the success as well as the cost of your PPC campaigns.
If you are trying to improve your Quality Score for the long run, eliminating Low-Quality keywords would be a right step.
However, aimlessly deleting the Low-Quality Score keywords is not always the best solution.
You need to carefully analyze and trace out those keywords who possess a Low-Quality Score for a long period of time.
Before deleting the Low-Quality keywords focus on these two things:
- Identify the most likely to succeed Low-Quality Score keywords.
- Make a whole new campaign for your Low-Quality Score keywords to keep a track of their performance.
If still, the keywords are receiving Low-Quality Score- delete them.
Poor CTR and lack of relevancy may also be the reasons for the keywords to have Low-Quality Score.
By improving your CTR and making your keywords relevant, you can easily convert the Quality Score of your keywords from low to high.
7. Grouping Keywords
Grouping Keywords means arranging them in an appropriate manner.
It is one of the most important yet most overlooked PPC marketing activity.
It is the process of making the keywords tight, well organized, and high performing.
[bctt tweet=”Organize your ad keywords according to themes and keep them directed.” username=”adstriangle”]
Grouping keywords brings combined benefits to your PPC campaigns. Some benefits are:-
-
High Click-Through Rate
-
More Conversions
-
High-Quality Score
-
Low Cost per Action
And these factors help to maximize your ROI.
While grouping keywords, you must pay special attention so as to make the keywords perform effectively.
Keywords will deliver the desired results when subdivided into appropriate groups. Thus, grouping keywords are essential.
Targeting the audience becomes easy as specific keywords have a higher probability of reaching out to the target audience.
What if you went to a cloth store and all the clothes were mixed up? If you went to buy a pair of jeans, you would be there for hours sorting through cardigans, hoodies, shirts, trousers, and what not!
This is what exactly happens when you don’t group your keywords.
The best way to group your keywords are:-
- Organize and segment your keywords into small and significant groups.
- Convert your keyword Groups into Adwords ad group.
You can also group keyword on the basis of match type and performance.
Remember, do not add lots of keywords in an ad group because stuffing keywords:-
- Lowers the performance of your PPC.
- It reduces CTR.
- It leads to irrelevant impressions.
8. Refining High Performing Keywords
High performing Keywords are those that actually generate business for you. These keywords are the ones that make you achieve your goal.
High performing keywords are worth keeping as they are the main reason for the success of your PPC campaign.
Many advertisers think that leaving the high performing keywords to run on their own is a good option.
Though it is not!
As we say there is always room for improvement so is the case with high performing keywords as well.
You can increase the performance of high-performing keywords in the following ways:
- Examine the search term report and check keyword performance.
- Make separate campaigns and budget for high performing keywords.
- Analyze the average position of high performing keywords.
- Check the CTR and Quality Score frequently.
- Make changes in the bidding Strategy to get maximum returns.
[bctt tweet=”Observe your high performing keywords and adjust bids accordingly.” username=”adstriangle”]
9. Eliminating the Non-Performing Keywords
Unfortunately, not every keyword in your PPC campaign will work out. Those keywords are called Non-Performing keywords.
They possess a danger to your PPC campaigns.
It becomes really necessary to pause these keywords because it only costs you money and does not generate any lead or sale.
You can read more about how to identify non-performing keywords in our previous blog post.
Basically, there are three types of Non-Performing keywords:-
Keywords with no impressions:
These keywords simply waste your time and money. These keywords are those which are not searched by Google users.
Give certain time to these keywords expecting them to improve. But do not spend much time on them.
Keywords with impressions but no clicks:
These keywords show your ad in the search query but do not meet the requirements of the users.
Hence, the ads with these keywords do not get clicked because they are irrelevant to the needs of the users.
[bctt tweet=”Non-Performing Keywords lower your CTR and bring down your Quality Score.” username=”adstriangle”]
Keywords with clicks but no conversions:
Generating clicks are not enough. If the keywords are not generating conversions simply means that they are not performing well.
These keywords should be eliminated at once because they increase your Cost per Acquisition and damage your budget.
Conclusion
PPC keywords cleanup process bears relevance since it removes all the factors that slow down your PPC success. Avoiding PPC keywords cleanup will lead to campaign sinking.
While analyzing your PPC keywords you have to examine which keywords you need to remove, pause, refine, and add so as to make your PPC campaign performance reach its desired level.
I hope these suggestions will certainly prove productive for you in the long run while determining your PPC success.