This is the number one thing you need to ensure that is happening in your Pay Per Click campaigns.

One thing a lot of people do not realize is, when they turn their campaigns on, just because everything seems to be up and running smoothly doesn’t mean that it’s not going to change.

Over time your quality scores may go up or down, your keywords that used to show up may not show anymore, other keywords that were not showing might get a bump.

But one thing I want to show you here is, this is a campaign for an insurance client of ours. They are an insurance brokerage, they sell car insurance, home insurance, business insurance.

The insurance industry is obviously very, very competitive, especially in the Minneapolis market, because it is a large city. This is a campaign that’s been running for only a couple of months now, but you can see the cost per clicks aren’t too terribly high (for the industry). But one thing you need to do is, on occasion go in and check your keywords to see if they are running.

If they are not active, you either need to change your ad, you need to increase your quality score, or you need to just get those keywords out of your campaign because they’re just weighing the rest of it down.

In this instance, I just logged into this campaign. You can see this insurance company keyword, it says “Limited by budget.” What that means is, our budget has run out for the day, we’ve already used all of it up. This keyword would continue to show, but our ads are not showing because we’ve already hit our daily budget.

So that’s something worth keeping in mind, do we need to increase our budget? Is that something our client can do? That’s a conversation that we’ll have with them later.

But other things I want you to look at is the keyword “automobile insurance”. This shows that it’s below the first page bid. Now for this keyword we used to pay $4.85 per click. But now the first page bid estimates are suddenly $18. So, what that tells me is that the quality scores dropped.

Now, just because it says $18 doesn’t mean that if we bid that high that we we’re going to pay that, but I’m not sure I want to take that chance. Now, I might up my max cost per click, I might change my ad, I might do a couple of things because on seventeen clicks this has brought us two conversions. So that’s worth considering because that’s a 11.7% conversion rate (which is great). But right now, this keyword is not even showing.

You can sort your keywords out by clicking on status, and as you can see there’s probably a dozen keywords here that are not showing right now, and some of them for good reason.

Home insurance has only got a .25% click through rate, so something is going on there. Maybe it’s a bad ad, but I need to go through that. That is bringing the quality score of our campaign down.

But home insurance quotes, that’s got a one out of four, that’s something that we need to look into.

Like I said, this is still a relatively new campaign, so a lot of the average positions are down and we work on that over time. But right now, we just want to get these keywords sorted out.

Another thing that might happen is, we might see low search volume keywords. If it says low search volume in red, that means that people are not looking for those terms right now. That may change later, but pause those keywords.

What’s happening is that if you have an ad group where two or three keywords are doing well and none of the other keywords have any search volume and they’re not even showing, then you’re just bringing the quality score of that ad group down. So, pause those keywords that aren’t getting searches.

So, the number one thing you need to ensure is happening in your PPC campaign, make sure your keywords are showing.