Guitar Strumming Lessons Online: Performance Tip: When Should You Pause Keywords?

Thursday 1 December 2011

Performance Tip: When Should You Pause Keywords?


When to Pause Keywords in AdWords

	December 1, 2011 - Sadly, not every keyword you attempt to target in your AdWords accounts will work. The good news is, because PPC offers a fountain of immediate feedback in the way of data points, it’s possible to identify poor choices in your initial targeting and take swift action. In this post, we’ll walk through the two major examples of keywords you’d be better off pausing, as well as some potential pitfalls to consider in thinking about actually shutting down these keywords.

Keywords that Spend Money but Don’t Convert

This is probably the most immediately obvious and intuitive example of a keyword that should be paused: keywords that are costing you money but not converting into a lead or a sale. But even within this classification of keyword, there’s a bit more nuance than meets the eye.

Let’s imagine we sell paid search software and every lead is worth $100 to us based on both the number of those leads that turn into sales, and our company’s margins. Obviously once a keyword spends something like a thousand dollars it seems pretty clear that keyword should be paused, but what if:

The keyword is sending visitors to a poor landing page?
The keyword could convert better with a different (lower) bid?
The keyword has poor, untested ad text associated with it?
The keyword has spent and not converted in the last 30 days, but generated a lot of business for us in the past at an acceptable cost?
The keyword is an informational term that drives a lot of later stage conversions?

Any of the above could mean that you’re leaving money on the table in pausing a keyword, so before you decide that a keyword is something that spends but doesn’t convert, you want to look at…

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