My Top 5 AdWords Filters For PPC Managers

When I first started working with PPC, I would download all of my keyword data to excel and then begin sorting by price, cost per conversion, or whatever other metric I was interested in. Rookie mistake. Now don’t get me wrong, I do love excel, but it was a lot of time wasted sorting through all the data when I could have spent 30 seconds creating an AdWords filter to do it for me.

Filters can help you easily evaluate the performance of keywords, ads, or campaigns. I want to share with you the top 5 AdWords keyword filters I use to evaluate and improve PPC performance.

Keywords that Spent Without Converting

I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t like to spend money without getting anything in return. This filter to identifies keywords that have been getting clicks and spending budget without converting. I normally run this filter once a week and pause any keywords that have spent 20% over goal without bring in any conversions for the month. If you have a certain spending threshold you can enter it into the cost box so you only see keywords that have spent above this point.

High Cost Per Conversion Keywords

It’s not only a problem to spend money that isn’t bring in any return, but you also don’t want to spend more on a keyword than a conversion is worth. If you have a goal cost per conversion you are working towards, this filter will display all the keywords that have converted above goal.

I’ve also created another high cost per conversion filter that only shows eligible high cost per conversion keywords:

This will show all high cost per conversion keywords that are still active in the account. This way the results won’t be cluttered with high cost per conversion keywords that have already been paused.

Low Cost Per Lead Keywords

This filter shows keywords that are converting below goal. I use this filter at the beginning of the month to make sure all of my low CPL keywords are turned on. It’s also a good idea to set your date range back a few months so you can use a longer date range to evaluate the keywords.

Keywords with Impressions, but No Clicks

This filter identifies the keywords that have over 100 impressions with no conversions. The impression threshold you set will depend upon the amount of traffic for your account. The higher the traffic the higher you should set the threshold.

This shows me the keywords that are not resonating with users. For any keywords not receiving clicks I would check two things: search queries and ad copy. Either your ads are showing for unrelated searches or your ad copy isn’t communicating well with users.

Low Average Position, Converting Keywords

This filter will show all keywords that have received a conversion but are showing, on average, below position 5. You can use this data to find keywords where you can increase the bid to get more visibility. If the keyword has proven to convert despite low ad positions, it’s likely that it will gain more conversions in higher ad spots.

These are my favorite keyword filters, what are some of yours?