When to Pause or Delete Ads & Keywords To Save Your Quality Scores

February 10th, 2010 | Amber | Quality Score

Have you ever truly thought about what your overall account Quality Score looks like and how it has affected your PPC account over the years?

The more I manage long term clients the more I realize everything I do today will greatly effect what happens to my account Quality Score in the future.

Achieving a great Quality Score does not happen overnight. It may take a week, a month or longer. But by constantly optimizing your PPC account over time you will see the effects of having a great Quality Score. Those effects are mainly seen in the cost it takes to get your PPC ads in higher positions. Over time, your costs should be less, and your ads should have higher placements.

I mainly work with my ad groups and ad texts to achieve a great Quality Score. And lately my new Google rep mentioned something to me that I don’t think I realized before.

She mentioned that paused or deleted ads/keywords do still have an effect on your account Quality Scores. Now I could have sworn my Google reps before told me that paused and deleted ads or keywords do not have a negative or positive effect on your quality scores because they’re no longer active. After all, you’re supposed to pause or delete poor performing ads/keywords; so why would a paused or deleted ad/keyword still negatively affect your Quality Score?

To add to this, even Adwords Pro Sarah on 11/5/09 mentions that although pausing or deleting have the same effect, that if you pause or delete a group of great performing keywords, your Quality Score would be based on the ok and poor performing keywords in that ad group, and no longer the great performing keywords you paused.

You’re right- there is no difference between deleting and pausing in terms of Quality Score. The only real way you could see an affect is in a scenario like this: you have 100 keywords, 50 performing well, 25 performing ok and 25 performing poorly. If you paused all 50 high performing keywords, your account quality score when then be calculated from the ok and poor performing keyword- so you would see a drop in the overall account Quality Score. That said, if you reverse the scenario and only pause the poor keywords, you could see a positive affect.

(AdwordsPro Sarah).

If anyone was under the impression that paused or deleted keywords or ads didn’t have an effect on your overall account Quality Score, please throw that out the window.

The following is a statement from my Adwords rep stating when to pause and/or delete ads/keywords in order to achieve a higher account Quality Score:

The historical performance of paused or deleted ads and keywords will continue to affect your account history. However, we still recommend deleting poorly performing ads and keywords to improve Quality Score. This will prevent the ads and keywords from performing poorly in the future and further affecting your account history. As the rest of your account accrues more performance history over time, the impact that the deleted ads and keywords have on your Quality Score will diminish.

I think it’s a good idea to delete poor Quality Score keywords and ads so they don’t accidently get resumed for some reason. Just note that in Adwords you can still resume deleted ads/keywords – so be careful of that.

If you’re really trying to increase your click-through rates (as you should be) delete those old poor performing ads, and continue writing new ads to test to increase your click-through rates. That should help over power old deleted ads or keywords that have lower Quality Scores.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 11:21 am and is filed under Quality Score. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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http://theppcblog.com Matthew Umbro

Hi Amber,

Interesting note about deleting keywords with poor quality scores. I prefer to pause keywords with poor quality scores, not delete them. In fact, I never really like to delete anything within the campaign, just pause items. This way I can easily see the historical data. Granted I can run reports but seeing the data in the interface is much more helpful.
http://www.pointupmedia.com Olivier

Google needs to address this in a much more substantial way. We have conflicting statement.

This is disturbing. It almost makes sense to have a working account and a testing account that you can transition your good ads from. I realize that then the keywords need to build up history in the working account from nothing but if they’re good, they’ll be flying quickly enough.
http://www.makeitbloom.com/xurxo-vidal/ Xurxo Vidal

Hi Amber,

I’ve recently been told the same thing by our adwords reps too. Like you, I used to think that paused and deleted adwords did not impact quality score, but now the adwords team has made it clear that they do.

And like Matthew, I too avoided deleting keywords and ads once adwords allowed us to pause them (I remember when you could only delete them), but our reps strongly hinted that there is also a difference between paused and deleted keywords and ads where paused ones can have a higher impact on the overall quality score than deleted ones.

Specifically if a keyword has a very poor quality score (4 or less) with a large number of impressions and low CTR then deleting rather than pausing may be a much better course of action.

Thanks for bringing this up because I’m sure many advertisers and PPC managers still believe that paused and deleted keywords have no bearing on their QS.
http://www.siteproppc.com Al Kuenn

Hi Amber,
I have been focusing on the same things for my clients lately and it does work. I usually pause keywords for a month and then delete them. Great article. Its interesting how slowly the quality scores go up compared to how quickly they will go down….
http://www.resourcenation.com/ Matt Commins

Great post! I too have always been an advocate of pausing keywords and ads instead of deleting them in order to preserve historical data. More importantly, I like to have keywords paused so I don’t add the same keyword when add keywords from the Search Query Report.
http://www.alan-rothstein.com Alan Rothstein

Isn’t the main google quality score on a three month rolling scale? The majority of your quality score will come from the performance of your account in the last three months.
http://www.clickequations.com/blog Craig Danuloff

Amber, interesting idea to discuss. But after reading your material carefully, I come to a very different conclusion. It seems that the following is true:

1) The historical performance of any keyword is not removed when that keyword is paused or deleted. OK, nobody should have expected that it was.
2) There is no difference between pausing or deleting a keyword, EXCEPT deleting prevents you from un-pausing it in the future. Duh. And it doesn’t stop you from re-creating it and thereby attaching to the old Quality Score either so that is just sill.
3) If you pause/delete high Quality Score keywords and leave poor Quality Score keywords running, then the impact of your pause/delete was negative on your entire account. Duh 2.0.

Nothing said in the quotes you provide, nor anything else I’ve seen suggests that an individual keyword, while paused or deleted, has any impact on the Quality Scores calculated from that day forward other than the impact on historical CTR of the account (and target URLS) incurred during the time before it was paused.

In other words, while it can’t remove the past, pausing or deleting a poor performing keyword has exactly the same effect.

Please let me know if I’m misunderstanding something.
Ari

You dont need to delete. Pausing if fine enough.

I just saw this comment from Adwordspro sarah:
There is no difference between pausing and deleting in terms of Quality Score. And, because you can always ‘undelete’ Deleted keywords- there really isn’t much difference in function either. I think ‘deleting’ just makes some people nervous

http://www.google.ru/support/forum/p/AdWords/thread?tid=23df5c9d06833fa6&hl=en
Nick

Quick question.
Why are my deleted keywords within a group still leaving impressions?
I scroll through the keyword list, sort for results of TODAY, notice some keywords have been deleted, but still notice that they have left impressions. What gives?
Ashley

Hi Amber. I have a question regarding paused keywords. In one of my accounts I have 1,700 kw currently paused which all have a QS of 2.

Should I be switching all of these to delete to help boast the live KW’s in the account?

When to Pause or Delete Ads & Keywords To Save Your Quality Scores

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