Inactive Keywords

What should you do with them?

[shilmy]

Google has decided that some of keywords in my campaign is poor of quality and make it inactive.

I have no intention to increase the bid, so what should I do with the keywords? Delete them or just let them in my campaign with an inactive status?

Thanks for any insight.

Regards,
Sjarief

[nutkenz]

If you can't increase your keyword's Quality Score by optimizing for relevancy then it might be better to delete it - because too many inactive keywords seem to lower the Quality Score history for your entire account in some cases - unless the keyword is still generating clicks from the Content Network and you'd like to keep it that way.

If your keyword doesn't seem relevant or doesn't perform well over time, I would suggest that you delete it. When you delete it, try creating another keyword which provides more useful information about your products or services. Don't delete an inactive keyword and then add it back to your account at a later time. The Adwords system will remember its performance history, even if you re-add it to a different ad group.

<snip>

[edited by: engine at 10:51 am (utc) on Feb. 25, 2008]
[edit reason] No sigs, thanks, See ToS [/edit]

[shilmy]

The keywords is relevant to my ad copy and to my website, I will definitely use the keywords if the minimum bid is lower than my max CPC.

I just can't increase the quality score because the rule is not clear. In fact, those ad copy and keywords is come from Google optimization team. It seem that google people it self do not understand how to optimize for adwords.

[MadeWillis]

I wouldn't rely on Google to write the best copy for your ads. You should know your customers and market better than Google.

[shilmy]

I just want to try how capable they are in handling keyword quality score.

They offered me the optimization after I ask why I get poor quality score with relevant keywords, relevant ad copy, and relevant landing pages/site.

And after running their solution for several days, I got poor quality score too. So I think quality score is just their way to get more from their money.

So, back to my question, if I let inactive keywords in my campaign and don't do anything to fix those keywords, will it change it's status to active in the future?

[MadeWillis]

If you optimize other aspects, say your landing page, you could possibly see the keyword come back without updating the bid.

From Google:
"Quality Score for minimum bid is determined by a keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword to its ad group, your landing page quality, your account's historical performance, and other relevance factors."

[chinara]

1) how much more is the minimum bid than your max cpc?
2) what is your ctr for that keyword(s) ( have you had any impressions)?

[T_Media]

No matter what you do, your quality score history is poor for that keyword now, which means you'll constantly have to fight your poor history and pay higher for the keyword than normal. If you optimise your landing page so that your page appears highly relevant to the keyword, you will eventually manage to build a good history for that keyword again and bid lower, however you may have lost more money than you wanted to in that period.

If the keyword is extremely important to your business then I would optimise my landing pages to match the keyword and then start a new adwords account with different details so that I didn't have to fight against a poor history.