How I trashed an AdWords campaign by accident – and why Search Funnels will now prevent that…

In 2006 I was running an account where everything was tracked to a sales conversion.

In those days there were no Search Query reports, and you couldn’t pause keywords – to stop them running you had to delete them.

So, since a big proportion of my keywords were showing no conversions, yet were costing us money, I decided to get rid of them.

Big mistake. The campaign promptly tanked.

WTF?

How come keywords with no conversions were so important to those with conversions?

My conjecture became “the Keyword Life-Cycle”. Or “Keyword Attribution”.

This is an old problem – Google now calls them “assist keywords“, “assist impressions“, and “assist clicks“.

This is a truly exciting development from Google.

They tell me it won’t be fully integrated into Conversion Optimizer until later in the year, but when it is, savvy AdWords users will have an incredible power over their less clued-up competitors.

Read the full story on Google’s blog here:

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