It's time to identify poor-performing keywords and make them work harder for you. You'll want to improve the relevance of your keywords to help boost their Quality Scores, modify the match types for ones that aren't helping you meet your advertising goals, or delete duplicate keywords in your account. This article shows you how to find low-performing keywords, and helps you understand how to fix them.
Before you begin
Once you know how to find data for your keywords, you're ready to work on improving them. A good way to start is by looking for and removing duplicate keywords.
Improve your keywords' relevance
You'll want to make sure that your keywords are relevant to your product or service. That way, customers are more likely to click your ad as they search for specific terms, which can help improve your clickthrough rate (CTR) and Quality Score. Think about it: if you run a floor waxing business, you probably don't want your ad showing to people searching for hair waxing salons. Here are some ways you can improve your keywords' relevance:
- Try replacing a single-word keyword with terms or phrases. Use keywords of two to three words that potential customers are likely to use to describe your product or service. In some cases, this means you'll want to make keywords that are too general more specific.
General keyword Specific keyword waxing wood floor waxing floors floor waxing services cleaning floor cleaning services - Make sure your keywords are relevant to the ads in your ad groups. Let's say the ads in your ad group are about the services you specifically provide for pine wood floor waxing. You might want the keywords in that ad group to include the term pine wood. You can try using keyword insertion to dynamically update your ad text to include one of your keywords that matches a customer's search terms.
- Group your keywords by themes based on your product or service. And make sure your ads are about your keyword themes. That way, we can show more relevant ads to potential customers when they're searching for a specific product or service. You can also look at how your company's website layout to get an idea of how to group your keywords.
See which search terms triggered your ads
Once your keywords have gathered impressions and clicks, see what people who saw your ads actually searched for with the "search terms" report. Learn more about the search terms report.
Here are a few tips for using the information in the report:
- See optimization opportunities. Your ads may be triggered by terms that you hadn't thought of. Consider adding or updating ad copy and landing page content to better appeal to these searches.
- Get negative keyword ideas. If your ads are triggered on search terms that you don’t want, then add those terms as negative keywords.
Use filters to improve your keywords
Filters are a quick way to sort your keyword performance data and identify low-performing keywords. You can filter your keyword data by Status to see which keywords have low search volume, or maybe those that aren't showing your ads because they've been disapproved. Then, you can change your keyword with low search volume to a more general variation to help increase your traffic. Or, follow our advertising policies to fix any disapproved keywords. Here are some other filters you can use to see poor-performing keywords:
- Try using the Quality Score filter to see which keywords have a low Quality Score. For example, you can choose to see keywords with a Quality Score less than 3. Then, you can make changes to your keywords, such as making your ads or landing pages more relevant to your keywords, to improve your keywords’ Quality Scores.
- Filter your keywords by clickthrough rate (CTR) to see which keywords get you a lot of impressions, but few clicks. For example, you can filter keywords with a clickthrough rate that's less than 1%, and then make changes to those keywords so they're more relevant to your ads.
- Filter your keywords to see which ones are below your first page bid estimate. Then, you can increase the cost-per-click (CPC) bids for keywords that aren't showing ads on the first page of Google search results based on your first page bid estimate. Try using automated rules to automatically raise your keyword bids when they are below your first page bid estimate.
Best practices
Best practicesRead the Google Best Practices guide about effectively managing your keywords in Google Ads. Topics include:
- Manage match types for growth and control
- Expand the reach of existing keywords
- Refine your traffic with negative keywords
