Google Adwords 'Inactive for search' - impact on campaign until paused/deleted?

[Azam.net]

Heard from our Google rep. that if a keyword is shown as 'Inactive for search' due to, for instance, a poor Quality Score, it will continue to impact negatively on the entire Camapaign until the keyword is either paused or deleted, or the bid amount increased to make them active.

I hadn't heard this before. Anybody else know if this is the case?

Until now we've just left keywords inactive as weren't aware they needed to be paused/deleted/bid increased.

Cheers.

[SpongeBob]

I just read that if you're going to pause or delete an inactive keyword it's a good idea to raise the minimum bid to whatever silly amount Google's asking for and THEN pause/delete it. That way Google will see your account history as having no inactive keywords and so rate you higher than if you'd left them at inactive.

No idea if that's true, though.

Some of my keywords have gone to inactive - what's the best way to get them back?

For the main ones I've created a dedicated copy of the landing page with the keywords mentioned more (though they were anyway, but I've added a few headlines and things), put them in their own adgroup and changed the URL to the new landing page. The minimum bid is still 50p (I was bidding 35p originally) so I've also upped the minimum bid to 50p to see if that gets things going and if I can then reduce it.

I also added privacy policy, terms, abouts us and contact pages to the site, as I've heard AdWords like that on their landing pages.

I'm hoping that Google will look at the new landing page and hopefully like it more, so reduce my bid.

Any idea if that works?

Or are there any other techniques - e.g. I heard about deleting the campaign and creating a new one, but I can't imagine Google not being aware of that. Has anyone tried it?

Or once you have a keyword get to a silly price are you stuck with it?

[user1635]

Azam: I wouldn't think that inactive keywords have any effect, since ranking and pricing is indivdually calculated for each keyword. E.g if one keyword in the adgroup has a 10% CTR and another has a 1% CTR, the 10% keyword get cheaper while 1% keyword doesn't.

SpongeBob: you don't have to delete the whole campaign, just delete the keyword from the adgroup once you've optimized your ad/landing page, then add the keyword again and it will give you a new bid based on the new quality score.

[SpongeBob]

Originally Posted by user1635 SpongeBob: you don't have to delete the whole campaign, just delete the keyword from the adgroup once you've optimized your ad/landing page, then add the keyword again and it will give you a new bid based on the new quality score.

I've tried that and it's not worked - AdWords remembers the bid the keywords had before they were deleted. A couple of them have now jumped up to £2.50 minimum bid!

[AttractionTix]

Inactive keywords, and the others in a group do have an impact on the overall effectiveness of a campaign. Google are as we all know very illusive about exactly how their systems work but I have been assured by some of their senior guys that the group of words as a whole can impact on each other to some degree.

Its difficult to say how much of an impact that would have though, but one way to look at it is from the point of view of the adverts you are running. Different groups of keywords will work better for different ad texts so where possible you should try to group words which go very closely together and then subgroup be effectiveness. This will allow you to get the lowest possible bids for your keywords where all words in a group do really well, and if you keep the low performers together by the same logic they wont damage the others.

Hope that makes sense! I didnt believe it myself until I saw it in action

Having said all that my personal opinion is that the relevancy of your landing page, adtext and the design of your site have more of an impact on the bids than which words go with which.

[jimbanks]

Inactive for search means that your ads will not run on Google sites only. That being said if you get more than a certain percentage of your keywords inactive it's possible to get the whole thing killed.....and it doesn't stop there. If you have poor quality score it's a bit like rotten fish, the bad smell lingers long after you get rid of the offending item. Not only will you not show for search, if you run content network too you won't run there either, not even on the Made For Adsense sites that exist to catch that traffic.

From a personal perspective I think the QS issue is actually BS and here's why. A site with 50,000 keywords we know of had all 50,000 keywords inactive for search and a minimum price of $10.00 imposed to be activated. To "fix" it they had tried to add content, get links, etc. etc. all to no avail.

The solution that worked.....

A brand new domain at $7.99 (your prices may vary).

Copy the entire content and change the URL to point from say xxx-site.com to yyy-site.com

Fire up adwords editor do a find and replace, where you are replacing xxx-site with yyy-site.

In this instance the majority of the keywords went from $10.00 to $0.10 inside an hour, exact same poor quality content, with the same great conversion that had made it worth buying 50,000 keywords in the first place.

As a footnote, don't expect this solution to last forever, it might get you a few extra months of life, then the same thing may happen, worst case scenario is you have another junky domain. Eventually Google may need to rework their algo for PPC because stating the QS issue as the reason for ads not showing clearly isn't the case.

Be interested to hear if it continues to work.

[Shane]

Yup QS is BS for sure..

Just done a blog post on exactly that and how a campaign with sweet 21% to 29% CTR and super conversion between 30% and 59.9% !!! on good click volumes got nailed for £5.00 a click despite the site being well overspecced and inside the landing page guidelines.

use the work around whilst they last.. as Jim says.. won't be long till they code around it.. I think the QS factor is directly linked to the price earnings ratio of google stock lol

[jimbanks]

shane if that theory is true then GOOG having gone from $750 at the beginning of November down to $550 there should be flurry of QS improvements!!

Can't see that theory myself.

It never ceases to amaze me how people can conjure up defeat from certain victory. With all the fallout of various Google Adsense updates etc. Yahoo/MSN/anyone could have capitalized by asking people to switch but instead Yahoo are hinting at layoffs :

Yahoo hints at major job cuts - vnunet.com

With Panama they had the perfect chance to gobble up market share but they introduced similar "quality" initiatives in certain sectors and in the process killing stone dead some revenue streams that would have been beneficial for all parties. I think sometimes they don't give enough credit to the people using their search engine and in them being able to decide for themselves what is relevant or not.

Still, after over 9 years in the business I don't really know why it surprises me...