We were greeted today in the onlynaturalpet.com Adwords account by a new ‘warning’ message:

The keywords in your account are nearing an unmanageable size. We recommend that you reduce the number of keywords within your account. This will ensure that your account includes the most targeted and relevant keywords possible. Use our AdWords Editor to identify poor performing keywords within your account (such as keywords with few or zero impressions) and delete them. Note: Be careful when deleting keywords in campaigns that are only opted in to the content network. Impressions and other statistics aren’t attributed to individual keywords when ads show on content pages, but are attributed to the ad group as a whole. Therefore, keywords in content-only campaigns will always show zero impressions.

This isn’t a suprise.

The campaign we inherited had just above every keyword in every account included three times, as broad, phrase, and exact match. To make matters worse, many 3-4 word phrases are included in different word orders, which is obviously redundant at least to the broad match versions (and usually the phrase and exact match versions are nonsensical).

How bad is it? The Adwords Editor identifies 335309 out of 341203 keywords as being duplicates!

Thus far we’ve only cleaned these up in a few ad-groups while doing some other reorganization. The balance will be a project for the next week or two.

This post is part of a case-study series on the Commerce360 management of paid search campaigns for onlynaturalpets.com. It is being done with the kind permission of Only Natural Pet Store, and some data has been changed to keep PetSmart guessing. For your convenience, we’re keeping a list of all posts in the series.