The keywords in your account are nearing an unmanageable size.
Please consider refining your keyword lists and/or reducing the number of keywords within your account.
Has anyone gotten this before? What is the threshold? I would have said at the very, very most that I have 50,000 keywords spread over a few hundred AdGroups spread among 32 campaigns.
I didn't suddenly add anything major recently. This message just showed up today.
Now I try to do the right thing and I have several seasonal campaigns paused so I deleted all those keywords (after backing them up to my PC) and I'm probably 10,000 lower. The message remains.
What does Google want me to do and why is this suddenly a problem? I can't be one of their largest accounts. I'm just one guy who has entered these all by hand over time. I read here of "bulk uploads" which I know nothing about and posts that refer to hundreds of thousands of keywords, so why pick on me? Surely, those using the bulk uploads are using up more than me.
AWA? Anyone? What triggers that message and what is going to happen to me? I have few disabled or hold/trial keywords. Surprisingly few when I ran a report, I'm proud to say. I'm wont to start deleting keyword phrases I cleverly researched; I need that edge over the competition.
Surely Google isn't running out of disk!
patient2all
- Login to your account and click on the TOOLS link
- Under Modify Your Campaigns, click on Find And Edit Keywords link
- Under Performance History drop down menus (there are three of them), select
a) Number of Impressions
b) All Time
c) Is Equal To
Under the empty field, enter 0 (zero).
- Select the 'Delete these keywords' radio button.
- Raid the fridge and grab a beer or a sandwich
- Select all the zero impression keywords and hit delete. The error message will be gone.
If a keyword has never received a single impression during its lifetime, then it is not worth being in the adgroup. Get rid of it. Deleting such zero impression keywords will not adversely affect the performance of your campaigns.
If a keyword has never received a single impression during its lifetime, then it is not worth being in the adgroup. Get rid of it.
I like your tip, vibgyor79!
Surprising no one, I'll say that I have to agree - so long as the keywords have been around for more than a few days, at least.
Surely Google isn't running out of disk!
Well, no.
But it's worth saying that it is not just the tiny bit of data represented by the actual keyword itself that the AdWords system must contend with.
Every keyword also generates a wide variety of stats, which are changing with every single impression or click. That can be many, many, thousands of updates per day, per keyword, for very general keywords. And each impression or click for each keyword is also filtered, and so on and so forth.
All in all, there is fair amount of computing power expended in all this. And if it is expended supporting millions and millions of low performance keywords, system wide, well, that might just slow things down a bit at some point. ;)
And that is not a good thing, if those keywords are not at least providing value to the advertiser, or Google's user.
AWA now gingerly stepping down from favorite soap box... ;)
However:
1) My keywords are well thought out. I didn't just upload the dictionary.
2) I have many, many products, each of which will get results from unique queries.
3) 40,000 is not a large number by today's computing standards. I've dealt with indexing millions of items by hundreds of different fields and gotten it done in the real world. If you have millions of advertisers, then you're taking in (millions * n$). You should be able to devote the computing resources to handling the business. It's not just Google, it appears to be an industry trend to greatly underestimate the amount of CPU required to get jobs done efficiently. There is a leader in a seasonal business field who invariably ends up with a site that can not be reached when they would do the most business. Somehow, they don't learn year after year. I can't understand throwing away sales that way. Similarly, if I get less clicks because I don't have all the bases covered, Google makes less money.
If Google has, I believe, 8 billion pages indexed and they can be retrieved quickly and many of them are junk and they pay you nothing, why can't you accomodate a paying advertiser with relatively modest needs?
4) Why do I keep reading here of corporate campaigns with hundreds of thousands of keywords? There was a post today from someone talking about loading 8000 keywords into an AdGroup. They weren't talking about it in the context of that being too many either.
5) I searched on 'feces' and we have a famous auction house selling them. Clearly that was a result of a massive upload.
6) I'm aware that there is a "bulk upload" feature available for "Premium Advertisers" according to threads that AWA participated in recently. How much does one have to spend to become "Premium"? I spend about $2,000.00 USD a month, not enough? Now if that feature is only available to certain advertisers, it contradicts the often made claim that AdWords provides a level playing field for all advertisers, large or small. I don't even want to be a "bulk uploader", I just want ample space to manage my account effectively and have a fair shot at catching every query relevant to what my ads offer.
7) I've often read that a surprisingly high number of internet searches consist of unique queries that have never been used before. This suggests that even keywords with no impressions for a month or so can "surprise" you the next day. I see it happen myself time and time again.
8) This "too many keywords" must be a recent policy, since I could find no mention on this forum prior to January and my account has not grown significantly recently.
9) I'm still waiting for AdWords Support to respond. Hopefully, they'll actually look at my account. I implored them to not simply tell me to start deleting stuff.
10) I understand keeping ranking algorithms "secret", but precisely how AdWords handles plurals, misspellings, punctuation, articles, prepositions and broad matching should be very clearly documented. The best that can be found in the help are "hints" and in some cases, contradictions (as in the plurals as someone recently pointed out). If I could predict better what will trigger a search, I could perhaps hone some of my lists considerably. Most information about how matching takes place comes from anecdotal accounts in this forum, experimentation on the part of those with much patience and the sole example of "tennis shoes" in the documentation. And I do not sell tennis shoes :) Would it help if I got into that line of business :)
11) Yes, Google is the best PPC. I readily herald that fact to all who will listen whoever I'm addressing. Unfortunately, the internet world has adapted standards that are far more casual than that of more established businesses. I've worked in more than one "brick and mortar" MIS shop where 3 instances of downtime a year would have resulted in massive personell replacements. For better or worse, the internet tolerates much more in the way of glitches. I used to defend internet glitches to this being the "Model T" days of cyberspace, but we're starting to get away from that now and should be approaching at least the "automatic transmission" age!
12) Today, there is a notice on my Campaign Summary page that says:
Important reporting and billing notice
Due to a recent system delay, your account reported fewer clicks than you actually received. We have resolved this delay and adjusted the number of billable clicks from all affected days in February.
Does that just affect me, many or every advertiser? In the real world, I would have had to hang my head in shame for a year if I had let something like that happen.
patient2all
Google still might consider those disabled keywords as loading their sacred servers with extra load. Deleting them is the only solution.
To avoid deleting recently added keywords, you can exclude individual adgroups from deletion - just look at the various options under the keyword tools.
>>> If Google has, I believe, 8 billion pages indexed and they can be retrieved quickly and many of them are junk and they pay you nothing, why can't you accomodate a paying advertiser with relatively modest needs?
Totally agree. Please don't put bandwidth and infrastructural restrictions on our accounts.
One correction to my prior post:
There was a post today from someone talking about loading 8000 keywords into an AdGroup.
That post I alluded to mentioned loading 1800, not 8000.
patient2all
