When to unpause a keyword (everyone deserves a second chance)
Any search marketer will tell you that you can’t go wrong testing out a new keyword. If the keyword drives conversions, wohoo, you’ve got a keeper! If it doesn’t, you can always pause it and the budget you spent was the price of a lesson on what kinds of keywords you might not want to buy. I regularly clean up my accounts by pausing non-producing or really, really low performing keywords, as do most good search marketers.
But at some point, unless they’re really generic or almost irrelevant, I think paused keywords are worth a second look.
If the keywords are for a particular product (ie, an iphone, a vatican tour, etc), its worth a quick check to see if the product is now on sale or more competitively priced than before. Also, if the landing page has user generated content elements (like a review), does it have more favorable content now that it didn’t before? Has the website functionality changed in a way that improves conversion or makes the landing page more attractive or functional? Any of these kinds of factors might improve the keyword’s performance and make a re-test worthwhile.
When you’re looking to drive additional traffic, its also much less time consuming to hit the unpause button than it is to go out and find new keywords. Worst case, the keywords still don’t convert well and you pause them again, best case they convert better and stay live in the account. You might lose a little budget, but that’s a fair price for learning.
I wouldn’t recommend resuming any really generic keywords - its unlikely that those will have improved much in performance, and they’ll probably end up inactive from low quality scores anyway. Sometimes its good to let things go.
If you are going to retest some keywords, be sure to give them ample time to get traffic (if they are tail terms) and drive transactions, particularly if you are in a business like travel, with significant latency.
A good time to retest is right before your high season, for example, November for retail, and May or June for travel. Which means I need to get on it!
