When to remove keywords that don't convert

[Alexandr24]

Hello,

I understand that you have to run keywords on a campaign for a decent amount of time before deciding to remove them as they don't convert. My question is: when should I do this?

Where is the threshold of removing a keyword & being sure that you won't regret removing it, because it will surely won't have potential in the future. After (as specifically as possible) how many weeks/months? How many clicks? What CTR?

Thanks!

 

[VitalyProkofiev]

basic affiliate rule is at least 2x offer payout without conversion, but it depends on so many variables. Sometimes you see that keywords is not a niche match, then you can kill it straight away, if you tight on budget and want to optimise quickly you can kil it after spendind 1x offer payout if you know the niche. Gets more complicated with few-steps flow, (f.e lead generation for b2b, then salesman contact, lead nurturing, etc.), anyway you have to know exactly how much you earn on whatever you are doing.
Personally, above that, I like to run everything for at least a week to see how day of the week affects campaign (and to get overal "feeling" of campaign behaviour), but i do it only on niches I'm not familiar with, which is rare for me these days, i stick to what i know. Also, I don't mint aggresivelly deleting low traffic keywords, but I think three times before I kill high traffic ones - I'd try to understand and adjust my flow first

 

[hao.]

If I had to give a simple advice it would be that you should look at the keywords where you spend the most amount of money and the keywords that convert the most (you should have here a lot of common ones).

Example:
Let's say you have 20 Keywords.
5 of them passed the 10 conversions mark.
10 of them are in the middle 3-5 conversions.
5 of them have no conversions.

You know which are your dominant keywords and which are just wasting money. By the time the 5 bad keywords get to being middle keywords they will spend x amount of budget.(if they ever do get to middle level)

With that x amount of budget the 5 good keywords would have gotten from good to amazing. You just have to find your numbers for your niche.

Where is the threshold of removing a keyword & being sure that you won't regret removing it

I know exactly what you mean by this. A keyword that isn't performing right won't start bringing in mad conversion out of the blue, the odds of that happening are low, number don't lie. By keeping that keyword with the thought that "hey, it might just start working" you will pay for that.
You will drain budget from good keywords because of FOMO for the bad ones.

 

[VortexAlpha]

There really isn't some exact rule or timeline that you can follow as it depends on which niche you are targeting, how competitive your market is, how old your site is, do you use keywords with high monthly search volume, and so on. You definitely have to run a campaign for at least some time in order to get real results and better insights about what is working and what needs to be removed or modified. It takes usually up to one month for your campaign just to pass the learning phase by algorithms, and after that, they are finding a way to optimize it in the most efficient way. So, although there isn't some strict rule, you should wait for about two months to get first conversions and to see which keywords aren't doing the job.