Pause Keyword

Why you see the Pause Keyword improvement and how Opteo bases a decision.

Shaquira Jeyasingh avatar
Written by Shaquira Jeyasingh
Updated over a week ago

Why Pause Keyword?

Sometimes, keywords don't benefit your account in the way you hoped. Bad keywords may draw in lots of clicks but no conversions, meaning you're spending lots of your budget on searchers who don't convert. 

If you see this improvement, a keyword has spent much of your budget while converting very little. It is performing so poorly that we recommend pausing it completely. 

How does this improvement work? 

Opteo will only recommend pausing a keyword if there is enough data to make a good decision. To make sure we’re looking at a combination of the most recent data but with enough volume, Opteo will:

  • Perform a ‘Minimum Clicks’ calculation which looks at, on average, for this keyword and keywords like it, how many clicks it takes to get to 3 conversions (minClicks = (1/AvgConvRate)*X). For example, if a group of campaigns has an average conversion rate of 10%, then minClicks = 30 clicks.

  • Check multiple look-back windows of 30, 60 and 90. In our example above, if a campaign has achieved 30 clicks within the last 30 days, Opteo will perform an analysis looking at this most recent data only. However, if we cannot get enough volume by looking only at the last 30-days, then Opteo will check the last 60 and 90 days.

Once we have found a look back window with enough data volume, Opteo checks the CPA of each keyword against the target CPA of its campaign group. If a keyword’s CPA is far above the target, or it’s spent money for no conversions at all, we’ll flag it for pausing. 

There are some exceptions which Opteo takes into consideration before generating a Pause Keyword improvement. Opteo will not recommend pausing a keyword if:

  • It is in the best performing 30% of the account

  • You have a Google Grants account and the keyword's click through rate is greater than 5%

To help you decide whether you'd like to Pause Keyword or Dismiss this improvement, we'll show you the amount spent on this keyword, the number of conversions generated, its CPA, and the CPA of its campaign group. 


Technical notes:

  • Opteo checks all enabled keywords inside enabled ad groups.

  • This improvement is appropriate for manual, eCPC, target CPA, and target ROAS bidding strategies.

  • The CPA of the keyword must be at least 3x worse than the campaign group CPA target to trigger this task.

  • If the keyword has no conversions at all, the keyword must have spent 3x your CPA target to trigger this task.

  • As for most of our analyses, we'll only consider conversions you specify in your campaign groups. By default, we consider all conversions.


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