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If you’ve been in the adwords game for very long you should know the importance of deleting keywords with low CTR’s. If you’re not familiar with the concept or the reasoning behind it, here’s a brief outline.

Part of the way Google calculates the ranking of your ad is by the click through rate (CTR). In simple terms, the more people click on your ad the higher it will rank. That combined with your bid amount is what determines your placement in the rankings. This is determined on a keyword by keyword basis.

Originally Google automatically shut down your keywords if the CTR went below 0.5%. Then they changed it so those low CTR ads would continue to run if you wanted them to, but they would charge you even more.

Which gets us back to the importance of deleting low CTR keywords. Google gives your whole account an overall “quality score.” (They may do this on a campaign level too.) So if your account contains lots of low CTR keywords then it will drag down the quality score of your whole account, which will make you pay more for all of your keywords.

I’ve experimented with this on and off over the years and It’s amazing to me how drastically this can affect your bottom line. I generally delete any keyword with a CTR lower than 1%. Sometimes though that deleting gets put off or forgotten about which is not a good thing.

I’ve had this one campaign running for about 18 months. It was so dialed in that for the first 6 months it averaged a 600% ROI overall, with some keywords making 1000% ROI. It was awesome!

Then, about a year ago, the ad positions and ROI started to nosedive and I had to drastically increase the bids just to maintain position. (In hindsight, this was probably due to the landing page quality score which I’ll address in another post.)

This went on for about 8 months (down, down, down) until eventually many of the keywords were not even profitable anymore. But I kept at it. I was beating a dead horse I know, but I couldn’t stand to see this cash cow go down in flames. These keywords that used to make me so much money were now virtually worthless. The prices I had to pay to place well made the keywords no longer profitable.

So I kind of forgot about that market and went on to other things. Recently though I thought I’d give it one more shot. I put the ads up again, tweaked some things and some of them started to do alright. Nowhere where they were before but still profitable.

Then I said “screw it!” I started deleting dozens of low CTR keywords. Any under 1% was gone. Regardless of if they used to make me money or not, they were gone.

And what do you know…the remaining keywords started to place higher. It was simply getting rid of the low CTR keywords that did it. Within a couple of days the average position of some ads went up 2 places. In fact all of the remaining kw/ads started to rise in the listings. Some of them started to get dangerously close to #1 (which I generally try to avoid) and so I actually had to start reducing bids. (What a problem to have!)

In my experience, just pausing the adgroup or campaign doesn’t help. In fact, in my experience deleting the adgroup doesn’t help either. (I guess because they’re not really deleted, you can still undelete them if you want to.) You have to go into the adgroup and delete the actual keyword for it to have any effect on the account. Then you can delete the adgroup if you want to, but the important thing is to actually delete the keywords themselves.

So if you haven’t noticed, the point of this post is to DELETE ALL OF YOUR LOW CLICK THROUGH RATE KEYWORDS! Do it and you’ll save money.

And since this week Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) is also starting to use CTR to rank pages you should probably start deleting your CTR KW’s in your YSM account too.

Delete away and save money! How easy is that?

Technorati Tags: PPC, Google+Adwords, internet+marketing, traffic+generation, Yahoo+Search+Marketing, CTR click+through+rate

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