I am also taking into consideration the average position for that keyword. If it is a high number then I tend to delete it over ones that show on the first page.
This sound like a good idea to you?
What is your strategy?
A more pressing problem is a keyword that generates a ton of clicks but no conversions. This needs to be fixed quickly with a look at the landing page to see if there is something wrong there, then negative keywords if it is a phrase or broard match, or deleting if it doesn't look like I can find a way to convert the clickers.
Why bother?
Spend the time instead trying to get the words to GET clicks, rather than delete them.
Once a campaign has been going for a little while, say 2 weeks, I will go and delete any KeyWord that has over 150 Impressions, but a CTR of 0.5% or under. This will slowly bring your CTR up over time for the Campaign.
C.K.
Many of our 'borderline' words have high ROI.
CTR is Google's measure of success, not ours. Indivdual keyword ROI is not our measure either. It is ROI on PPC as a whole we consider important.
The CTR that is used in the bid rank formula [webmasterworld.com] is only for that specific keyword [webmasterworld.com].
I have to agree with Nyet in this thread.
There must have been a reason you choose that KW in the first place, hopefully it was because you felt it was relevant. If the KW has a positive ROI - then try different ads/matching options to make the KW work - deleting them just because they have low CTR could be costing you some profiable KWs.
So as long as you are not in danger of losing the campaign due to low CTR why bother deleting low CTR words.
I just wanted to throw in one quick comment.
There is one case worth mentioning, where it is to the advertiser's advantage to delete low-performing keywords (however you define them) rather than letting them continue to run.
When your daily budget is lower than would be required to have your ad show all the time, then you can increase the frequency of your ad showing on your more important keywords by getting rid of the less important keywords.
In other words, when one's budget is low, the fewer keywords you have the farther that budget goes in terms of showing the important keywords more often.
If your budget is allowing your ad to show all the time already, then deleting the less important words won't make any difference.
AWA
*very* good point!
I would still consider either ROI or (more importantly for some businesses) the total number of conversions for each word as the determining factor rather than CTR.
People seem to get fixated on CTR which for the Advertisers has little (or nothing) to do with the bottom line.
If you don't delete the keyword, and it has a low performance, then it will dramatically affect the keyword's performance in the new campaign.
Thanks for clearing that up guys. So I shouldn't be concerned with "Campaign CTR". Only if the Campaign CTR is getting too low. I should focus on actually tracking the low CTR words to the sale, to see if they actually produce, right?
C.K.
I should focus on actually tracking the low CTR words to the sale, to see if they actually produce, right?
Yes.
But you should be tracking the high CTR words to the sale as well - those are the ones you're spending more money on.
So what I did next was ask the experts of the Google Adwords team to come up with some campaigns for me. As soon as they did, I was penalized again after only two hours and then my account was "slowed" again! I told them that my account "slowed" and the CSR replied that because I've used similar or the same KWs previously which triggered a "slowed" activation for those KWs the algorithm was more quick to "slow" those same KWs again.
Make sense? It does but is anyone out there getting penalized as much as I am. I actually don't even have time to react before I'm penalized with a "slow" activation. I don't what they expect of me short of sitting in front of my computer all day and clicking to see my CTR for each KW.
I've even used WordTracker and the Google Adwords tools to help me find additional more targetted KWs. Nothing seems to work. My goodness the Google Adwords experts faired far worse than I did. Any suggestions? BTW, my target is people seeking real estate agents in their area if that helps anyone.
That might jump your CTR for some specific KWs to let you get a handle on what KWs will eventually convert.
Also, use negative keywords - this will slow impressions down for phrase and broad match terms that aren't quite related to your query.
Once one of my keywords was disabled because of low performance. It really had bad CTR and disabling it was a right step in that campaign. However, a month or two later I used a same written keyword in another campaign targetted to a different language. This time it was totaly new keyword with different meaning in that language. Despite that, Google remembered its history and immediately after adition it tagged it At Risk and disabled it after less than 100 impressions without a click.
Conclusion: as long as this bug exists in AdWords, it's safer to delete low CTR words as soon as possible.
