That Pam Chick

I regularly talk with many PPCers and clients who want to better understand their AdWords campaigns, don’t understand some nuances within AdWords or just need to know how to get their campaigns to “the next level”. Some of the same questions come up over and over again so here are the top 5 questions I hear regularly with answers that have been verified by AdWords representatives.

1. How can the average position of a keyword be on page one but AdWords is telling me the bid is below page one?

This will only happen on broad and phrase match terms. It means that the bid for that specific keyword is below page one but when the keyword is broad or phrase matched to other search phrases, it can appear in higher positions because the bids and competition for those phrases are not as much as they are for the specific term that you have bid on.

This presents a good opportunity to look at your search query report and see what phrases your keyword is being served for and add those phrases so you can control the bids for each keyword phrase.

2. How do paused keywords affect campaigns?

In the past we were told if we no longer wanted a keyword to run but it had good CTR or other attributes that would benefit a campaign we should pause it. If it had bad attributes, we should delete it.  This is no longer the case as pause keywords do not have any effect on campaigns anymore. Once a keyword is paused, it’s CTR and quality score no longer impact the campaign overall. The keyword has already helped or hurt the campaign before you paused it.  Therefore, if you are never going to want to reactivate a keyword, you can delete it. The only benefit to keeping keywords paused instead of deleting them is that you can reactivate them and keep their performance history at a later date.

3. Does having a lot of paused keywords in a campaign affect the campaign?

No, as mentioned above, paused keywords do not affect campaigns. However, if you have a lot of paused keywords you may want to delete them to reduce bloat as very large campaigns take longer to download/upload with AdWords Editor. Also having a lot of clutter in your campaigns may distract you from problems you need to address.

4. Does having a lot of low search volume words harm campaigns?

The short answer is no. When a keyword gets no impressions, it has no effect on the campaign. However, if the keyword is served a few times and gets no clicks, AdWords may decrease the Quality Score which will affect the campaign. You need to closely monitor low search volume (well, really all) keywords for Quality Score and either try to get the Quality Score up through optimization or delete any from your campaign that are not generating revenue/leads/etc.

5. Are all Quality Scores weighted the same?

All Quality Scores are weighted equally and do not affect a campaign more or less based on the number of impressions they receive.  A keyword with a 7 Quality Score and 10,000 impressions will affect the campaign just as much as one with a 10 quality score and 100 impressions.  So, you should concentrate on doing everything you can to maximize the Quality Score for all keywords. Of course increasing the Quality Score of the highest traffic ones will result in the most benefit as reducing the CPC on the highest traffic terms will result in the most savings. But, you shouldn’t ignore the rest.

Also, keep in mind that AdWords assigns Quality Score based on keyword, regardless of match type. So if you have the same keyword on broad, phrase and exact match, you will have the same quality score for all three so you won’t have to worry about increasing the Quality Score for all three individually.

If there are any other nuances or things that make you scratch your head when dealing with AdWords, post them in the comments and I’ll give you my take.