What to Think About Before Pausing/Deleting Keywords

August 30, 2022

Having a lot of keywords on your account is great when you are trying to show up for queries related to your product or service, but what about when it is time to get rid of keywords that are not performing well? There are a few things to consider when thinking about pausing or deleting keywords beyond just pausing or deleting those that are doing poorly.

To be frank, pausing/deleting keywords in and of itself is not a good strategy. The reason is that you will have many other places where you are matching for that query. So, just deleting one keyword will not get rid of your bad targeting problem.

 

As shown in the image above, keywords can be mapped to many other queries, especially if you have broad or phrase-match keywords. Simply deleting one keyword from your account will not resolve the issue of your ads showing up for queries that you do not want to show up for. So, in addition to pausing the positive keywords, you must also add in  negative keywords based on your search query report data.

Although doing two different actions to solve your performance problem may seem daunting, it’s time well spent, because you’ll never have to deal with these poor performing queries that are weighing down the performance of your keywords again. This way, you will be able to go straight to the source and fix the issue. 

When you pause a poor keyword, you may be cutting out some good performance too. A similar thought process can be applied in this situation. First and foremost, the ‘good’ queries will probably just transfer to a keyword that you’ve not paused. To make sure, you can buy more keywords based on mining your SQR.