As of next week, ad groups with extremely low search volume will automatically be marked “Rarely served” and temporarily excluded from auctions for search and ad networks.
If any of your ad groups are marked “Rarely served,” suggestions will appear in the interface, offering ideas on how remove the marking. These suggestions are not required, however, as ad groups will automatically become active if at least one of its keywords gains search volume.
More about this marking
Using current search query statistics and the ad group’s accumulated impression and click data, Yandex.Direct assigns the “rarely served” marking in order to show that though it may seem that the ad group is active, users search for the ad group’s keywords for either very rarely or not at all. Groups with such poor performance are temporarily excluded from auctions.
Search volume is checked regularly, so you don’t need to worry about losing traffic if the products or services you advertise experience seasonal or irregular spikes in interest. Please note that Yandex.Direct assesses the overall number of queries for the group as a whole as affected by your targeting settings. Even keywords with seasonal interest can get enough search traffic as long as they are not excessively limited by geotargeting or other settings.
You will not see recommended bids for ad groups marked “Rarely served,” but can still find past click and impression statistics in Report Wizard.
To find out about how this new marking affects methods in the API, read this blog post.
After the launch, what should I do…
With rare topics?
Only ad groups (not keywords) can be marked “rarely served,” so you need to make sure all the keywords have sufficient search volume together. By grouping low volume keywords together into one ad group and using a template, you can take advantage of traffic for even the rarest search queries while maintain your ads’ relevance to the search queries that trigger them.
You can enter a separate landing page for each keyword. By using URL parameters {param1} and {param2} as part of the template, you can send users to different landing pages depending on the keywords of the specific ad they have seen.
With my negative keywords?
As an alternative to moving keywords from one ad group to another, you can remove negative keywords in active ad groups to ensure that your campaign as a whole takes advantage of rarer but still valuable traffic.
Here’s an example. Imagine you have two ad groups with the following keywords:
- Ad Group 1: buy leather jacket
- Ad Group 2: but jacket –leather
Imagine that Ad Group 1 receives only two impressions a month and is marked “Rarely served.” Due to Ad Group 1’s exclusion from auctions, your overall campaign loses its impressions.
To remedy this, remove the “–leather” negative keyword from Ad Group 2. By doing so, Ad Group 2 is triggered by “buy leather jacket” queries and you keep the impressions from Ad Group 1 within your overall campaign.
With keywords that are not currently but could become popular?
You don’t need to make any changes in this case — just sit tight and wait for search volume to grow. The ad group will become active as soon as any of the keywords increases in popularity during regular search volume checks.
