I think since Low Search Volume is more of signal that an account contains far too many tong-tail kewords to be practical, rather than an absolute measure of search volume, you’re probably right that it can change over time within account of between accounts.

I would tend to ignore these warnings – as long as your keyword strategy is not too over the top (i.e. bidding for keywords such as ‘cheap long distance flights to Australia with hotel package deals’ then you should be the judge of which keywords should remain in your account.

Cheers,
Alan

Alan

You could be right, if each AdWords account had 500,000 obscure keywords it will start to become inefficient. I think it’s also to help reduce AdWords spam, as its impractical for Google to monitor quality for so many keywords, even with bots, but I don’t think they’ve taken the right approach.

I just hope deactivating low searched for keywords doesn’t remove opportunities for small businesses, who can’t afford to compete with big advertisers on expensive generic keywords, to target highly-qualified small niches and get real value from paid search.

Great blog and very good PPC and Adwords Articles. I think Google has another intention behind the warning. They want to reduce the number of keywords, because it costs them server capacity.

Greetz from Germany

Thanks for your question.

Search engines use keywords to determine what ads are showed on their search result pages, whereas content networks instead use ‘themes’.

When you create an ad group with a bunch of keywords for the content network, it isn’t your keywords which are being assessed individually, but instead the overall theme of all your keywords in the ad group. For that reason – and also that there is generally no ‘search volume’ on the content network – low search volume doens’t apply for the content network.

Hope this helps,
Alan

BTW I think your content here is excellent!

Thanks for your question. Keywords marked as ‘low search volume’ will still show, it’s just a warning from Google not to expect many clicks.

I guess it’s just a way for Google to scare advertisers away from the cheaper, long-tail keywords, and towards the more expensive, generic keywords.

Does “Low Search Volume” mean NO Adwords ads using this keyword will be shown…or is this just a warning from Google not to expect many clicks?

If Google says that due to “low search volume” your ads were not showing…then how did you arrive at the Impressions and CTR numbers from ads that did not show?

Sounds like a great deal, get clicks from ads that were never shown. What am I missing?

Great, well written article. I have discovered the same in my Adwords experience.

I have a pretty large adword campaign with maybe 5k terms, ALL longtails, 55+ landing pages and corresponding Ads.

It delivers like MAD and costs hardly anything.

If I go into my account it too shows the low volume warnings everywhere, but I just ignore them.

I’m paying about $0.20 per CT in a ultra competitive market here, Atlanta Real Estate, and getting lots of leads.

Rob for Atlanta Real Estate

Looking forward to reading more posts.

Thanks for commenting. The 804 were those LSV keywords which were shown, so all 804 received at least one impression. But if we look at those keywords which failed to show…well, the account had 8,064 keywords, of which 2,823 (35%) appeared at least once. This leaves 5,241 (65%) of keywords which did not.

Unsurprisingly, every one of these 5,241 keywords were marked as “low search volume”. So out of 6,045 (5,241+804) LSV keywords, 840 (13%) received at least one impression.