by Dan Smith

Created on: February 07, 2009

Deleting poor performing keywords is essential to maintaining an Adwords campaign. Each month you need to check your keywords and remove the poor performing keywords. It's like pruning dead branches to make a healthier plant.

Do you delete the keywords, or move them around to alternate ad groups and campaigns? It's quite possible to move keywords using the Adwords Editor. It depends on how you want to maintain your campaign history.

Adwords makes decisions on the quality score based partly on past performance. By only moving poor keywords to a back burner ad group you help Adwords maintain your account history. Adwords rewards accounts that have been active longer and have a thorough history. Moving keywords will not affect your performance history. Google's optimization will move keywords from one ad group to another.

Deleting a keyword can affect the performance history, and damage your account to the extent of removing that history.

But, deleting keywords performs other useful functions. First, it prevents new impressions of your ad. If the keyword was not performing well, impressions without clicks will be dragging down the CTR of your entire adgroup and campaign. The quality score of any keyword is determined by several factors, including the adgroup and campaign level CTRs. Second, erasing certain history data may be necessary for a clean, fresh start. But be warned, not all history is deleted. The Adwords help section says...

"If you delete a keyword and then add it back to your account in any other format or any other location (placing it in another ad group, for instance), our system will still take the keyword's past account-wide performance into consideration. A poor performer can affect an entire ad group and/or campaign, if it is used multiple times."

Personally, I prefer to delete keywords if they have a low CTR. A low CTR is mostly common due to a low ad position, which equates to a competitive keyword. Raising the minimum bid in the case of a low ad position might bring the CTR up, but at the loss of ROI.

If you choose to try to keep the keyword, I would move it to an ad group just for it. That way, if you use phrase and exact match, you'll know exact what the consumers search term was. You can put the keyword in the ad itself. This will boost the quality score. Plus, the consumer should be compelled to click on it when he sees his search term, thus improving the CTR.

Since I usually have a very large number of keywords to start with, I tend to delete keywords. This helps preserve my budget and ROI. I can then concentrate on the other keywords that are not so competitive.

After you have split tested and tuned your other keywords, you can always come back to reactivate the poor performers. At that point, at least you'll know it's not your ad or landing page that's responsible for a low CTR. If the keyword continues to have a low CTR, delete again.

You end up with a healthier campaign if you remove poor performing keywords from it.

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