Adwords newly inactive keywords

[marthome]

We're seing some troubling changes in some of our Adgroups and maybe someone could shed some light on it.... Your comments are welcome!

We started to have some keywords inactive even if the keywords were very relevant to the landing page, the ads were relevant too (10-15% CTR).

I contacted Google by chat. What agent said wasn't relevant; "pricing is competitive and yadi yadi yada...". The fact is we're bidding 25cents and we're in 4th position. The agent also said to change the keywords match.

In the Adgroup that was looked into by the agent we've deleted the inactive keywords, added them again plus added some " ", [ ] match and they were active.

The thing is we did the same thing in 2 Adgroup that wasn't checked by the agent and all the added deleted and added keywords were still inactive.

This lead us to believe the agent simply re-activated the inactive keywords she saw in the Adgroup she looked into because the inactive status didn't make sense. All this while in the other Adgroups Google was still trying to have us raise our bid to crazy high CPC.

Did anyone ever had the same experience? Or is Google just trying to get more money by making hard for its advertiser to fix the the inactive status unless they contact them?

Your thoughts are welcome!

[AdWordsRep]

This lead us to believe the agent simply re-activated the inactive keywords she saw in the Adgroup she looked into because the inactive status didn't make sense. Having worked at AdWords for the past four plus years, I can say with some authority that this is not the case. ;)

There is no such mechanism - and support folks have no secret levers or buttons to re-activate keywords that have become inactive.

AWR

[marthome]

Any idea why this happenned then?

If our CTR was good (10-15%) on inactive keywords and CR % was in the 30-40% range (I guess that mean the landing page are rather relevant...), plus the ad position in the 6-12 range... The what's the problem?

Thanks again!

[losloslos]

You said the CTR for the ads was 10-15%, how was it on the actual words.

But....I have tried using words that were not used in my account before and google already has a high start up price. Sometimes to even test a word they require a $1-5 min bid. Google has enough data collected by now that they know what a word is worth to them regardless of whos account it's for..

In the case that you mentioned, where switching the matching type did not activate the word, makes sense if switching from broad to exact didn't affect how often your ad was triggered. For example if your keyword was "keyword funtime" you have it on broad, but people really only search for the exact match of it "keyword funtime" and not any varations such as"keyword happy funtime" or "keyword funtime party", then broad, phrase, and exact are really already the same because there are really no variations of that search phrase that people actually look for.

[marthome]

To be more precise, the 10-15% CTR was in the same range for the keywords and ad.

[The Generator]

Disabled keywords have frequently been a problem for me, especially with some of my company's expensive, competitive flagship keywords. To reactivate them I simply changed the matching. Here's the funny thing. If you want your disactivated broad matched keyword to be reactivated and to remain on broad match just swith the match to exact or phrase then swith it back to broad right away and presto.

[losloslos]

Generator,

The technique you mentioned worked very well last year before Google came up with their new raise bid for activation, and now it doesn't as often.

With Google's raise bid method, it no longer is a bid against competitors, but you are bidding for branding and for cost per impression. Why else would you have to pay $5 per click to activate a word that only 2 other companies are bidding on. No cheap branding with google

[AdWordsRep]

Any idea why this happenned then? Honestly, no. Getting a handle on that would really require spending some time analyzing the actual account, changes made, etc.

Some general thoughts that may assist in analyzing why keywords have high Minimum CPCs:

* If there's a range of Min CPCs (meaning some low, some high) in an Ad Group, it's possible that the ad text and landing page are OK, but that the keywords with high Min CPS are not ideal - perhaps too general, perhaps not well targeted enough to the ad text, etc.

* If the keywords with high Min CPCs are all clustered in a particular Ad Group, then the problem may also rest with the ad text and/or landing page.

AWR

[AdWordsRep]

With Google's raise bid method, it no longer is a bid against competitors, but you are bidding for branding and for cost per impression. Why else would you have to pay $5 per click to activate a word that only 2 other companies are bidding on. No cheap branding with google losloslos, Min CPC does not get lower because one has fewer competitors. Instead, since Aug 2005, Min CPC has been based on the Quality Score of the particular keyword as used in the particular account. (In fact, minimum bids are often higher on keywords with low competition because the quality/relevance of these keywords tends to be lower.)

For more info, please see this Inside AdWords blog post from earlier in the year:

A common AdWords misconception explained...

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/01/common-adwords-misconception-explained.html

AWR

[losloslos]

Adwordsrep you are correct,

i should have made myself a little more clear. while in overture you can get away with some cheap branding .10 on high volume terms that only 2-3 other people are bidding on, but in google with their quality score you cannot. I know that overture also has a min ctr requirement but it is not enforced as heavily as adwords.