Keywords With Small Traffic

Low Search Volume keywords are ones that Google has identified as having very little search traffic. These keywords do not trigger ads and might as well not exist in your account unless their search volume increases. Google assesses its estimated search traffic on a weekly basis.

In general, you have two choices – you can either leave these ‘low search volume’ keywords in the account if you believe their search volume will increase in the near future. For example: a new brand name might have very low search volume but once the brand is better known searches for it might increase.

 The other option is to delete these keywords from the account, reducing clutter and making it easier to manage, especially when dealing with large accounts.

Where should you take special care? Many accounts have a structure that is based on match type, meaning they have Broad/Modified Broad, Phrase and Exact match keywords residing in different campaigns or ad groups. In order to funnel the traffic correctly so that the appropriate keywords trigger ads, advertisers usually use either incremental bidding (i.e., bidding highest on Exact, then Phrase, and lowest on Broad) or make excessive use of negative match type keywords (i.e., negating all the Exact and Phrase match keywords in the Broad/BMM campaign or ad groups so that ads are triggered by the Phrase or Exact campaign/ad group for the relevant search queries). 

However, when using the second method you have to take care to never negate a ‘low search volume’ keyword. Doing so cause no ads at all to be triggered.

Important: The keyword will be inactive until its search traffic increases, when the keyword can start triggering your ads to appear.

For example, the keyword might be considered too specific or obscure, or it was misspelled significantly. Keeping these keywords out of the ad auction helps Google Ads serve ads more efficiently and reduces the volume of keywords on our system. Before our system stops a keyword from joining the auction, it evaluates the number of searches on a given keyword worldwide over the past twelve months.

Low search volume status is unrelated to quality score, bid, or creatives, so editing these will not change the status.

There’s no negative impact of having keywords with low search volume status in your account, however you may want to remove them if you are hitting account limits.

You may see ads when searching for a keyword with low search volume status. For example, if your keyword is “red and blue bicycles for sale”, you could still see ads when you search for this on Google. This is because more general keywords, such as “blue bicycles” could trigger an ad for that search.

When you have a keyword with low search volume, you have a few options:

• You can choose to do nothing and wait for us to automatically check again in a week. If more people start searching for your keyword, we’ll reactivate it. This option can be particularly helpful if you’re advertising a new brand, term, or product.
• Remove the keyword and use the Keyword Planner to find additional keyword ideas.
• Change the keyword match type to something broader. For example, if the keyword is exact match, you could change it to broad match.
• Update the keyword to something less specific. For example, you could update the keyword “gardenia flower delivery in spring NYC” to “gardenia delivery NYC”.

Benefits of in bulk deleting low search volume keywords:

• when deleted low search volume keywords you will get cleaner google ads campaigns
• the overall health status of Google Ads campaigns and the Google Ads account will improve
• the number of keywords in the campaigns will be diluted
• more space for new campaigns and new keywords – very suitable for clients which have thousands and tens of thousands of keywords