April 10th, 2007 by James Omdahl
For better or for worse, Google has gotten more and more aggressive with deactivating keywords in affiliate marketers’ AdWords accounts. By doing so, they have caused a lot of headaches for affiliates and have managed to generate a lot more work for every AdWords advertiser. As I pointed out in the past, keeping up with Google’s quality score guidelines requires a good deal of work when it comes to the creation of focused landing pages. If you build an AdWords account around a web site with a lot of keyword focused, relevant landing pages, you should be able to avoid a good amount of quality score pain down the line.
But what if you’re one of the many affiliates who have already been slapped by big G and you have an AdWords account filled with inactive keywords with high minimum bids? How can you get your keywords back online and working?
Good questions, and luckily our fearless affiliate manager April Hartmeister came across a very instructive post on Reuben Yau’s blog called 5 Simple Steps to Reactivate Inactive Keywords in Google AdWords. Check out the post and use Reuben’s five step process to get your keywords back online.
One warning, to get things going you are going to have to do a bit of work and create focused landing pages. Consider yourself warned…
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- Inside AdWords Answers Three of the One Million Questions Asked About Quality Score [UPDATE: If you are a little lost on the...
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April 10th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
I think its important to remember that search engines work for the search engine users - always. If people dont trust, or dont like, the search engines, they wont use them anymore. What are we advertisers worth then? So we should really support what search engines do for relevancy.
If you have inactive keywords, but also valuable content that matches them, just contact your search engine rep. If you can prove your point, there is no reason for them not to accept the keyword. But if theyre right, you should consider dropping the keyword or adding the corresponding content.
One warning - search engines analyze your keywords by looking at what searches they match. If you use broad match, you really must use negative keywords. Imagine your search term together with words like “free”, “local”, “sexy”, “philadelphia”, “cartoon” or “lyrics”, is your website still relevant? Are you willing to bid for those clicks? Using negative keywords will rapidly increase your CTR and reduces the chance of getting your keywords inactivated.
(Yet another search engine post without the “G” word.)
April 10th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
This is a great post. Good find James!
One part that I disagree with is the part about deleting your keywords and starting a new adgroup. There is a lot of CTR history in those old adgroups that could be lost. Ive followed this advice of re-pasting performing keywords into new adgroups and watched my ad position plummet without recovering. I think the best route is to develop the focused content for the best coverting words in the group that were deactivated, resubmit the ad with the new link and wait. Youll end up with better positions, higher CTRs and lower CPCs.
Just my 2c!
April 11th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Great tips guys. I agree with both of you. Negative keywords really help your ads remain relevant, and I agree with Chuck that CTR history is an important thing to consider when dealing with AdWords.
Ive heard from an AdWords rep. that every keyword in your account has a history…and I remember her saying that deleting a word doesnt necessarily take the away all the history for a keyword. This means that if you delete a keyword, and add it somewhere else later, it still might have some history attached to it. I’m not sure how in-depth the history is - but adding and deleting keywords may not be the best thing in the world to do.
Now Im not sure if what the rep. told me is true anymore, but I wouldnt be shocked if it was.