Turning off poor performing keywords - especially when they're well targeted - can be a surprisingly tough decision. Marketers and managers want to see their ads running for the terms and phrases that they believe define their businesses. And there can be a hesitancy to taking the hit on the top-line revenue number even when considering the negative returns.

From an analytics point-of-view, we've developed a way to quantify and display the opportunity or benefits of turning off keywords using the SAINT classification capabilities of Omniture SiteCatalyst and SearchCenter. The result is a chart/table as seen below (click to zoom) that shows the historical revenue and expense associated with terms we've chosen to pause/turn off.

In this example, we see a series of keywords turned off over a six week period, and the revenue and expense that was spent on them over the past 60 days. In other words, if these terms had been turned off sooner, this client would be over $5,000 ahead (the actual number is higher than shown because many of these terms were off for much of this time period.) It's a great way to bring visibility to an activity that we know is right but often makes certain people nervous.

Of course, we could display this report showing the actual revenue and expense associated with each keyword, but aren't doing so here for privacy reasons.

Note that we could easily do this pro-forma, tagging a bunch of terms and presenting the historical losses in order to get approval to go ahead and pause/kill the keywords. I'm sure it sounds like an easy decision to some, but believe me there are CEO's, VPs of Marketing, and Line managers out there that do not like to see top-line revenue go away, regardless of the ROI. Sometimes making a visual case for stopping the losses is required.

Obviously, this process should go hand-in-hand, or follow, an effort to determine why these keywords aren't working, and improve creative, bids, landing pages, or offers to make them perform better. But sometimes there are barriers to getting some of those items fixed, and sometimes a keyword just can't win.

To create this report in Omniture, create several classifications in the SearchCenter Keyword Classifier, including KW-Status (which we load with On or Off) and KW-StatusOffDate. Export the SAINT file to excel, populate these two fields, import the SAINT file, then create the report from the Commerce >> SearchCenter menu.