The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Clean up your dirty campaigns!  No I'm not talking about politics here.  I'm talking about your search engine marketing accounts.  Unless you have unlimited funds, unlimited time, and more patience than sense, a regular cleaning of your PPC accounts can help profitability, improve quality scores, and it can save you time.

Many people do not realize that Google gives their entire account a quality score as well as at an individual bid term level.  This quality score is an aggregate and determines minimum bids on new terms.  When you have a lot of underperforming terms it increases your costs.  So it makes a lot of sense to go in and clean things up once in a while.

Along with following the recommendations generated by Clickable's ActEngine, here are three simple steps to clean up your accounts:

Pause terms that have no impressions over the last four months.  While some may advocate long-tail terms as a possible win, terms that have no impressions over a four month period are often useless because other terms in your campaign are more targeted and actually triggering your ads. If you have tried raising bids on a term multiple times, and after four months are still seeing no impressions from a term, it is probably time to move on.  Pause those terms and you will have a lot fewer terms to manage.  

Pause terms with poor quality scores if they don't convert.  Terms with low quality scores bring down your entire campaign.  If the terms are profitable you might try and raise your quality score through ad changes or landing page optimization, but fixing a poor quality score can be a lot of work.  If it isn't converting, and it is bringing down your campaign, pause it.

If you inherited a campaign that was poorly organized from the beginning, delete it and start over.  Poor organization, targeting, and ad copy are difficult to overcome.  Nine times out of ten you will see quality scores improve much faster by starting out fresh.  I highly recommend going back to basics and reading through Clickable's guidelines before organizing your campaign. (If you need more help getting started on a new set of campaigns, you can also contact our Assist team for premium service.)

Everyone who does pay-per-click advertising will tell you testing is key.  They are right, but after you run a test, get some insight, and make changes—clean up after yourself!  Pause those underperforming ads, keywords, ad groups, and even campaigns.  The three tips above can save you time and money.

If you have your own recommendations for cleaning up and organizing your accounts I would love to hear them.  Post your comments below.

Trace, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

I just started using ADWORDS in  my new job. I was thinking about having received a poorly managed account, but had no idea I could just start it again. You gave me an idea....

Thank you  Trace, until I read your posting I was thinking what could be the reason for the low lead on my CPC campaign. Now I am clear  what is the reason to the down flow of my PPC Campaign. I am going to clean up my account and start again.