Last week I was speaking with a smart guy at Google, and he advised me that one of our accounts included keywords with zero impressions. At first this didn’t make much of an impression on me . . .
He went on to explain that when a keyword has such low search volume so as to be designated by Google as not worth it’s weight in disk drive space, then Google flags the word and it can then never earn an Adwords impression.
My response was, oh well, so what? So I have 120 keywords in an ad group, and 20 will never produce even one impression. That’s life, right? Wrong. He went on to explain that such keywords have a negative impact on quality scores.
New Policy for Zero Impression Keywords
So, now we have a new policy: if a keyword has zero impressions after one month, DELETE IT. Don’t pause it, DELETE IT.
Consider this for all future setups. In the future I would expect initial client reports to include a recommendation about this matter, as applicable.