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Keywords That Don't Convert
2/16/2009
Unless you are one of the lucky few managing some sort of brand PPC campaign that has incredibly difficult goals such as low Cost Per Click and high Click Through Rate, chances are you actually have to get some bang for your buck with your search engine marketing efforts. By that, I mean you want conversions -- whether they be leads, sales, or otherwise.
When managing a pay per click campaign, it might seem intuitive to eliminate or pause keywords that are not driving conversions. This is not always the best idea, however, depending on what search engine you are optimizing in. For example, if you have the keyword 'shoes' on Broad match in Google, and 'blue shoes' on Broad match, keywords related to 'blue' and 'shoes' will be mated to your keyword 'blue shoes' (in some way, given that Broad match is overly Broad). Let's say it is incredibly difficult to find blue shoes on your e-commerce site. You probably shouldn't have been bidding on blue shoes in the first place, but for the sake of argument, assume you were bidding on this keyword. Because blue shoes are so hard to find, your CPA will be extremely high on the keyword blue shoes, so you want to get rid of it (some might lower the bid by 25 percent, or half, but let's assume we are trying to get rid of a keyword altogether). To “get rid” of the keyword, most people would either delete it, or pause it. In Google, this is not the always the greatest idea. Unless you are adding the keyword 'blue' as a negative keyword (and let's assume you do not want to do that because you also sell a brand of shoes called 'Blue Magic'), your queries that were formerly matched to 'blue shoes' on broad match will now be mapped to 'shoes' on broad match, driving up the cost per sale on the broad match keyword 'shoes'.
So what is the solution? According to Google, the LAST thing to occur in a keyword auction is the bid portion. So before the bid, Google will choose which keyword/match type to display an ad for, regardless of bid. So, instead of deleting or pausing your 'blue shoes' broad match keyword, you might consider lowering the bid to a penny. Effectively, this is “getting rid” of the keyword, but preserves the mapping of the non-ROI-yielding search queries to that bad keyword. No one will be clicking on your ads because your ads will not show up due to insufficient bid (or they will show up off the first page, and will receive no clicks). This is the best of both World's -- you have eliminated people searching on queries that do not yield ROI from seeing your ads, and you do not have to add any negative keywords.
If you are dealing with exact (not phrase) match keywords, it may be more acceptable to delete or pause a keyword. However, keep in mind that if you pause the exact match of a keyword, it may be mapped to another broad or phrase match keyword, so you may want to negative exact match it.
One other thing to note -- as any experienced paid search marketer should know, Yahoo! keyword matching is relatively unsophisticated. Yahoo! matching works nothing like Google matching, as Yahoo! matching strives to get you the lowest Cost Per Click for a particular keyword. For example, Yahoo! matching will mate up the search query 'flat screen television' to 'buy television' if the keyword 'buy television' is in an ad group with a higher quality score. These keywords hypotheticals, but I have seen similar scenarios occur in Yahoo! where search queries are not mapped to what would seemingly be the most logical keyword. This has been explained to me by Yahoo! as trying to get advertisers the lowest CPC possible. So for Yahoo, there is really no rhyme or reason for what you should do with a keyword you want to eliminate, because if you lower the bid, it is hard to know what Yahoo! will map queries to that used to go to that keyword. Due to this complication, I usually just pause crummy keywords in Yahoo! if they do not convert… after I have tried all the possible methods to get the keyword to convert at an acceptable rate of course. If anyone has a better method, I would love to hear it!
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