Paid search is often one of the first places businesses look when they need to make cuts to their marketing budget. But before you start slashing your paid search budget, it’s important to take a step back and evaluate your low-level campaign assets to understand which assets are not performing and why, how performance can be improved, and which assets should be "pruned" to improve overall performance.
In this article, we’ll explore how to prune deadwood from your paid search campaigns so that more budget flows to the keywords that are actually driving results. Let's face it, a campaign's performance – whether measured in return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) for purchase transactions, cost-per-action (CPA) for lead generation, or cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) for awareness - is just a mathematical average of the aggregate performance of all its low-level assets. There are obvious "winners" and "losers" (keywords and search terms) hiding at the bottom of the campaign hierarchy, where data is too sparse for the ad platforms' Machine Learning algorithms to operate.
“Deadwood” is a term used to describe the assets in a paid search campaign that are no longer effective and need to be removed. Deadwood can refer to pesky irrelevant search terms that drag down keyword performance and need to be added as negative keywords. Deadwood can also include keywords, ad groups, or even entire campaigns that are no longer generating leads or sales at an acceptable return on investment. In an ideal world, we would try improving performance of every low-level campaign asset before eliminating it. However, the time and effort required often outweigh potential performance improvements.
Why is it important to remove deadwood from your paid search campaigns? Because deadwood negatively impacts your overall performance and wastes your budget. If you don’t regularly prune the deadwood hiding in your campaigns, it’s like putting money into a leaky sieve.
To identify and trim deadwood from your campaigns, you must carefully assess the performance of individual keywords over time, in the context of business objectives and relative to peer group (also known as cohort) performance. Some keywords may have once generated high traffic but have become less relevant over time and no longer bring in a significant number of conversions. If you see a pronounced drop in results that is not associated with an expected seasonal drop, that’s a good indication that something needs to be changed or removed. Market competition may have increased for some keywords to the point that the conversions generated are prohibitively expensive. It’s important to exercise caution when pausing or removing keywords.
Tips for Pruning Deadwood Keywords With Caution:
Of course, there's no hard and fast rule for when to pause low-performing keywords. Ultimately, the decision comes down to whether or not you think the keyword has the potential to perform well in the future. If you think the keyword has potential, then you may want to continue running it while making adjustments to your campaign assets. However, if you don't think the keyword has potential, then you may want to pause it and focus your efforts on other keywords that are performing well. The key is to regularly evaluate performance so keywords that continue to perform poorly don't continue to waste spend.
If you want a way to automate the process, take a look at Condati Quant Marketer. Quant Marketer's prescriptive analytics solution not only tells you what keywords to pause and which search terms to add as negative keywords but provides many different optimization recommendations that are prioritized by financial impact. The continuous intelligence it provides means you know what actions to focus on at anytime. No ad hoc analysis needed.