Do you keep them and hope someone may click on your ad and make a purchase or do you delete the keyword?
How long do you keep the keyword? Hours, days, weeks?
Would anyone like to share their thoughts on this? Any input on when to remove or decide to keep a keyword would be helpful.
As a note. Some of these keywords have ended up as "at risk" and I usually delete them.
Thanks in advance.
Mark
These keywords may be making up 5% on up in impressions and rate under 5 in "Avg. Pos".
I'm not sure what this means. I don't have a percentage of impressions available when I look at my Adwords account. There is just the number of impressions. There are things that are calculated by percentage, such as Click Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate, but not impressions.
It sounds to me like you want to know how long should you wait to know if keywords are important. There is no answer for this question. Either a keyword is relevant to what your site offers, or it isn't. I know you are smart enough to make that call. If you're wondering about your performance of your ad, that's a different set of questions.
Is maintaining an Avg. Pos. of 5 and under good (I assume you mean positions 1-5)? Only if it is. Meaning, I have some campaigns that do well in the 1-5 slots and some that do well in the 5+ slots. I can tell you this for sure: On average, the higher an ad appears, the higher the CTR will be, and the lower an ad is the higher the Conversion Rate will be. The question is, if you position your ad to be lower, are you getting enough traffic that converts? Even if you position your ad lower for higher conversion rates, you may not get enough traffic. And while a high ranking ad may not get as high of a conversion rate, it still may get more total conversions, which is what you are looking for.
Here's the bottom line, if your ad is not getting click throughs, nothing else matters. That's why I only responded with the notice that a poorly performing ad will get booted by G no matter what you think about it. Meaning, it's not a vaild question to ask whether or not you should keep a keyword that gets 0 click throughs, because Google has already made that decision for you by implementing the .5% limit. However, if you are asking whether or not it makes sense to continue experimenting with your ad to see if you can boost CTR, there is no way to answer that question generally. Only by talking specifically about which keywords you are going after, what the nature of your site is, and what the Adword ad says could I help make a judgement call about whether or not to keep spending money dialing in an ad.
The best general advice I can give you is this. The road for how to craft Adword ads that receive high CTRs is always paved with experimentation. Experimentation can be costly. If you know the keywords you are focusing on are relevant for your site, then it's probably worth it to try different ads. In fact, Google allows you to have multiple ads for an adgroup. Craft many versions of your ad and see which ones get the highest CTRs, then remove the others and focus on tweaking the best performer. Try advertising the price in the ad, try advertising different unique selling propositions (USP), try using humor, etc.
Once you build a few successful Adword campaigns, you'll get the hang of the things people typically respond to, although, there is always room for additional experimentation and learning. I would look at your first several attempts as an investment in learning more than an investment in advertising. How long does it take to learn? As long as it takes. Usually that is measured in weeks to months. However, during that time you should be seeing improved performance. It's not like it should take months before you see success, although, it might take that long.
There are many other threads that cover the topic of how to improve click through rates. They also provide great resources for what things to experiment with for improved CTRs.
The decision to keep or delete a keyword should be based on economics - sales vs cost, ROI. You may want to increase the CTR to get more sales, but there is no reason to delete a keyword just because CTR is low.
Also, keeping low CTR ads helps crowd out your competition, and that's good.
The kicker is, there may ne no other sites paying for that phrase but it won't display. Google should allow exact phrase matches to go through even if you've been slowed if there is no one else using that particular phrase.
I'm not running a for profit site. I'm just trying to serve a special community and was hoping that adwords would help. As it is, this program is flawed for sites that serve specialized minorities.
As many a person once said to me, life isn't fair. ;-)
The reality is that if no one is clicking on your ad, then it is obviously not useful to Google's searchers. Google is the #1 search engine in the world because of their dedication to serving useful search results. They have to maintain the integrity of the system. Perhaps you should consider revising you strategy? Maybe it is your strategy that is flawed. Special consideration for activist groups would make them lazy advertisers. If you make useful ads, people will click on them and then you won't get booted.
Try tweaking the ad copy, or try building other keywords and phrases that might pull better results but still be on topic. How do you build other keywords you say? Here is a great resource for that:
If you enter keywords, it will help you find similar phrases. If you are going after "straight fathers with aids", I would start with "aids" and see what comes up from there. Like does it return results like "aids father" "aids dad", etc. Then I'd enter that phase and see if more specific terms come up. I'd also try swapping out AIDS for HIV (even if it is incorrect, people often use those terms interchangeably).
I would also think of other ways to approach your keyword. Maybe a father with aids would be searching for "aids transmission children". You might also want to think of the specifics that your site offers. Are there books for sale? Could you use the phrase "aids parenting book"? I know it may not seem as specific, but your sample keyphrase is a target demographic phrase. It's pretty rare that searches will use their own demographic data as their search term. Most straight fathers probably wouldn't think to identify their sexual orientation as a relevant search term if searching for resources to help them live with AIDS as a parent. I would think more about what will straight fathers with AIDS be searching for regarding their condition and then target that.
Good luck!
And welcome to WebmasterWorld DuckFat! I think you'll find this a world class source of insight as you fine-tune your AdWords advertising.
AWA
Sounds like your keyword is not the problem but your Ad text is. Try changing the text, especially the title. Include the keyword in the title. Also make sure you exclude alle words that don't exatly match your widgets if it's anything else then [widgets].
The only impressions that count for the cut are those on Google itself, not the total number of impressions.
