Pay Per Click Bid Management - Step Two

4. Effective PPC Bid Management, 4.5 PPC Bid Management-Step Two

Effective Bid Management - Step Two: Filtering Keywords with No Clicks and No Conversions

Filtering Keywords with No Clicks & No Conversions identifies irrelevant Keywords in an account. It also identifies Keywords that have lost traffic and/or conversion based on previous PPC bid optimizations. This is usually an interesting set to monitor. You can further break this list down to two sets:

• Keywords with positions 5 or better
• Keywords with positions worse than 5

You don’t have to take 5 as the deciding position, based on your accounts historical performance, you can choose any position that you know is the cut off limit for you. Based on the suggestions above, if positions are better than 5 that should tell you that the keyword just doesn’t have search volume and hence is not right for your account. Pausing/deleting those keywords would be wise. On the flip side, keywords with worse than position 5 are the ones that you can further test to see if they are worth keeping in your account or not. Now there is no hard and fast formula for this, so simply increasing bids by percentage amount for these keywords and follow up monitoring should tell you over time if they are keepers or not.

• It is advised that you base this decision on a large chunk of data - hence the first logic to check if there is at least 2 months worth of data available.
• Depending on your product/service, only a weeks worth of data might be enough for you to conduct this analysis due to the high volume of Impressions, Clicks, & Cost.
• Always keep track of your Ad Copy and Landing Page changes as that can effect conversions too.
• This analysis has helped me identify any Keywords that have no search volume or their PPC was set too low to prove their relevancy to the account.

Lost Impressions, Clicks, & Conversions:

• Could be due to Seasonality?
• Could be due to Increased Competition?
• Could be due to previous PPC Bid optimization (maybe a keyword was not converting as effectively, or bid was decreased aggressively)?

Related posts

• Pay Per Click Bid Management - Step Three (1)
• Pay Per Click Bid Management - Step One (0)
• Pay Per Click Bid Management - Data Storage & Filtering (0)
• Elements of PPC Account Optimization (0)
• Keyword List Generation & Expansion (1)

@ August 1, 2008