Andrew Goodman recently discussed devoting man/brain power to only the top performing keywords and eliminating the rest, essentially cutting out much of the long-tail.

For me, reading a respected search engine marketer discuss reducing keywords and placing emphasis on an account’s top performers is refreshing.  I am a strong proponent of creating small, manageable accounts and have seen little literature discussing the benefits of “simple” paid search campaigns.

This is understandable.

As PPC professionals, simple is not exactly what we want our clients thinking when it comes to PPC management.  Complex is where the big money is, and so PPC managers often over complicate paid search in order to provide “value” to their clients (the real jerks create PPC campaigns that are “too complex” to even share with their clients).

But in paid search, simple is the way to go.

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” ~Albert Einstein

For my dollar, the real expertise comes from a PPC manager who can set up an intuitive campaign, where the average marketer can look at the account structure and think “that makes sense”.  Of course, intuitive does not equate to basic.  A solid PPC manager will regularly test ad text, day parting, site targeting, geographic targeting, ad position (bids), etc but will do so in a clear, readily verifiable manner.

In terms of keywords, for the majority of businesses, a relatively small amount of keywords will drive the majority of sales.  Why target (therefore, manage) 50,000 keywords if less than 150 regularly convert?  What good are long tail keywords if they don’t receive traffic?

Living Simply

Your tactic for Tactical Thursdays is to rid your accounts of all keywords that did not receive traffic in the last 30 days.  Eliminate them altogether.  Look at the keyword performance report and purge any keywords that have not converted in the last 6 months.  Don’t pause.  Delete (preferably, store in an Excel file just in case, but delete from the account).  This will leave you only with regularly converting keywords.

Feel good?  Feel horrible?

If your anything like my clients, you just cut out 90% of your keywords, but really, you just cut out 90% of your work.  Time to focus that extra time on converting your top keywords.

Create more relevant ad text.  Test your landing pages.  Test promotions. Tinker with the conversion funnel.

Spend your time on what matters.