Poor Performing Keywords

what to do with poor performing keywords, pause, delete or let it ride.

[brzy56]

I'm doing a major cleanup of my Ad Words account and want to clean up my poor performing keywords so they do not keep accruing poor performance history and is one step to try to improve my overall Quality Score.

Two questions:

1) I paused a lot of keywords. Is there any difference, pros/cons for performance history, between Pausing and Deleting? And what about leaving keywords as "Inactive for Search" or should I just pause those too?

2) I have some keywords that are just low volume. Meaning very few impressions, sometimes only 20 per day. A lot of these have 0 clickthroughs therefore I have a 0% click through rate. Should I pause these because this looks like its poor performing? Or is it just low volume? Would you pause these, or would you let them ride to try to pick up some long tail clicks?

Any insight would be very helpful.

Thank you!

[Wlauzon]

We are doing the same, and sometimes it is hard to decide.

Some keywords are for high dollar items, which are seldom purchased online - but it seems almost impossible to measure "offline" performance of keywords.

From what I have seen, low volume keywords seldom get hit with performance issues.

[brzy56]

Yes, that's what my gut tells me as well. Thanks for sharing your input.

Any insight into pausing vs deleting?