Everyone has some keywords in their account that aren’t being displayed on the first results page (if they have several keywords). The biggest determining factor which makes Google decide not to display your keyword on the first results page is your Quality Score. If your Quality Score is low and your bid isn’t high, then that keyword will not display ads on the first results page within Google. When keywords are not being displayed on the first results page, they still being displayed in the contextual network. This means that these keywords are still generating traffic in the Content Search. You should be careful with keywords with lower quality scores, because an AdGroup with a large amount of poor quality keywords can affect the performance of your high quality keywords.

Getting Clues

I’ve spent countless very frustrating hours researching poor quality keywords and I have finally gotten to the point where I can understand why a keyword is poor quality based on certain information.

First off, in order for me to be able to tell you why a keyword is inactive you will need to know what Google is saying about that keyword by using the Ad Diagnostics tool. To do this, go to your AdGroup, click on the Keywords Tab, and then hold your mouse over the button of the magnifying glass next to your keywords. A window will pop-up displaying what the Ad Diagnostics tool says about that keyword. If you click on the “Details and Recommendations” link on the Ad Diagnostics window, it will take you to a page that gives you even more information about the keyword.

Decrypting Google’s Confusing Diagnostic Messages

Now I’m going to give you information that no other guide or source has online. I’m going to tell you exactly how to decode Google’s diagnostic messages to find out exactly why your keyword is inactive for search. Please note – the keywords in the pictures I’m showing you below are from my accounts and they will differ from keywords in your accounts, I’m just using the messages Google’s giving me to determine the problem.

The Best Message

This message means your advertisement is being displayed and your quality score is the best it can be. You will receive the most amount of traffic possible.

The Second Best Message

This is the second best message you can receive. It means that everything looks good and is running ok. You will receive full traffic amounts.

Message 1)

This means you’re viewing the diagnostics for a keyword that’s not currently being displayed because of another similar keyword in your account. To view diagnostics, click on the keyword in the account it’s telling you to choose, in this example the keyword was [adwords keyword tools].

Message 2)

This message means your bid is too low for your advertisement to be displayed on the first results page. Increase your bid to have your advertisement displayed.

Message 3)

This means that your bid is high enough to display your text advertisement, but your quality is low for this keyword. Click on the details and recommendations link to further understand why.

This means that your bid is below what Google’s minimum bid is. Click on the “Details and Recommendations” link to get more information and to understand why your keyword is inactive for search.

If you received either of the two quality score messages above (with Poor Quality Scores), use the following information found on your “Details and Recommendations” page to determine why your keywords are inactive for search.

Message 3 - Type 1

If these are the details for message 3, here’s what to do to increase your Quality Score.

This means that although everything is good with your website and your account organization, it’s not as good as your competitor’s advertisements. If you catch this early enough (within 24-48 hours of it going inactive) you can quickly fix it by increasing your bid to 50% more than what the keyword recommends bidding. So if I increase the keyword bid for a $0.30 advertisement to $0.45, within one-three days my bid quality score will improve and my minimum bid will decrease. When this happens I would lower my bid back down to an acceptable level. If you’ve waited for more than 48 hours, then you will need to increase your CTR to increase your quality score.

This is the most common type of quality score message I receive myself. Here’s a real example of this working in my account. The keywords that are marked as a $0.40 max bid were marked inactive for search 3 days ago with a minimum required bid of $0.30 to activate the keywords. I usually write compelling text ads that receive high CTR’s so I knew that Google just needed a quick boost in bid cost to get a better quality score status. 3 days later my minimum required bid is at $0.05 per click and my quality score status is “Great”.

Message 3 - Type 2

This is a potentially bad message to be receiving. It means that Google feels this keyword is bad in your account. If you get this message, don’t increase your bid, instead immediately delete the keyword. If you don’t delete the keyword within 24 - 48 hours Google will look for other keywords in your account that are similar to this keyword and will mark them as poor quality as well. Delete every keyword in your account no matter what its past performance is if Google says the keyword isn’t highly relevant. If you don’t delete these keywords quickly enough, you may risk not ever being able to use these keywords again in the future without them being inactive for search. People who keep these keywords in their account will quickly notice that just about every keyword in their account is becoming inactive for search without explanation. Here’s an example of what will happen. Let’s say John has the keyword “Golden Retriever House Training” and Google says it’s not highly relevant. But John disagrees and keeps the keyword in his account. Three days later John notices that Google has marked all the keywords that contain the words “Golden Retriever” as inactive for search. John doesn’t understand why, but still just increases the bid and ignores the message. Two days later John sees that his account received only 1,340 impressions when usually he receives 50,000+ impressions a day. He looks through his account and is shocked to find that every keyword with the word “golden”, “retriever”, “house”, and “training” are marked inactive for search.

If you didn’t delete this keyword soon enough and you’re finding that many of the keywords in your account are inactive for search, here’s how to fix it. First off, if your account is receiving zero traffic and you don’t really want to spend the time of fixing it, you can immediately start over by creating a new Google Account. If your account has value to you and you want to fix it, you can do so by deleting all the keywords in your account that have this message. Remember to find the phrase or word that Google is using to link the keywords to each other. In the example above, the phrase started off as “Golden Retriever”. You will want to find all of the keywords that are active for search and contain the phrase Google was linking to the inactive keyword. Make all of those keywords highly relevant and increase their CTR and bids to make their quality score increase. Keep those keywords well managed for a week or so and slowly begin to add some of the deleted keywords that Google had previously marked inactive because of irrelevant keywords. Make sure the keywords you’re adding stay active and relevant. If the keywords you’re adding are immediately inactive for search, you will need to work harder to improve your account history for those keywords.

Message 3 - Type 3

If you receive this message, it simply means that Google doesn’t like the website you’re advertising. Usually it is recommended to find another website to advertise if you’re receiving this message. If you own the website that’s receiving this message it can be a bit of work to get it back up and running, but it’s definitely possible to get the status back up. I would recommend reading the section titled “Quality Score In-Depth” to understand how to fix this if you own the website. If you don’t own the website, then there’s no way you can fix this error message as Google probably won’t even let you advertise the keywords they recommend using cheaply.

Message 3 - Type 4

This message means that you probably won’t be able to advertise that type of product anymore in this account. You definitely won’t be able to advertise the website you were already promoting (unless you want all inactive keywords) but any future websites that sell the same type of product will most likely automatically have inactive for search keywords as well. Usually when a majority of your keywords receive messages like this, you will want to start a new account. If only a few of your keywords receive this message, then delete those keywords immediately and there’s a chance your other keywords in your account will pull your account through so you won’t have any keyword issues. If you notice that every keyword you add is marked inactive for search, regardless of the website you’re advertising it means it’s probably time for you to open a new Google account because when that happens it is way too much effort to get your account back running normally.

Message 4)

This message means that the keyword has no past history in your account and Google hasn’t started displaying it yet. Usually you will see this message on new keywords you add in your account. (ignore the quality score part of this message because this message means the same thing if your quality score is Great, OK, or Poor)

Message 5)

This message means that the keyword doesn’t receive enough traffic for Google’s Ad Diagnostics tool to know if your advertisement’s being displayed or not.

If you have inactive keywords that are too expensive to increase the bid and nothing else works, you should either move the keyword to a new AdGroup and create a more targeted text advertisement (put keywords in the text ad) or remove/delete the keyword(s) from your account and try to re-add them at a later time.

Causes for Poor Quality Keywords

There is no way to know if a certain keyword is going to be poor quality, but if one of your keywords becomes poor quality, it is either because it is completely irrelevant or it is not targeted enough. I use to think that there was no pattern and Google just over judged some accounts, but after spending several months determining this I have found that there is a reason why every keyword is poor quality. There is hardly any chance at all that Google did it by accident.

A completely irrelevant keyword is a keyword which has nothing to do with what you are selling. An example would be if you were selling computers and you had a keyword “satellite dishes”.

Another reason for a keyword to become poor quality is because it isn’t targeted enough in the Ad or website. This means that your advertisement doesn’t relate to this specific keyword as well as it does with the other keywords in the AdGroup. The best way to activate this type of poor quality keyword is to move it to a new AdGroup where the text in the advertisement is more related to the keyword.

What’s An Acceptable Bid?

An acceptable bid varies from person to person and depends on your conversion rate and what you can afford. In Google’s opinion an acceptable bid is where your keyword is on first page results and your quality score is either Ok or Great. I usually never bid more than $0.20 per click (unless I need to briefly do it to increase my keywords quality score). The only times I intend to receive traffic at costs more than $0.20 per click, it’s because I am promoting a more expensive product. If you want to know the absolute most you should bid, there’s a helpful tool that you can use at this website that will tell you the minimum and maximum you should bid for your keywords: http://www.stevenholdaway.com/max-bid-tool.php

How to Know When You Need A New Google Account

Sometimes it’s much easier and time efficient to open a new Google account rather than fixing your current account. When you open a new Google account it’s a new slate meaning that your new account will not be affected by your old account at all.

Here’s how I would determine if it would be better to open a new Google account or not. If you’ve tried to advertise multiple websites, and all of the new campaigns and AdGroups you create have Poor Quality scores and nearly all the keywords require you to bid over $0.50 to get a first page result, then it might make more sense to just open a new account.

A new Google AdWords account costs $5 to open and Google will allow you to open as many AdWords accounts as you need.

Additional Quality Score Information

Here are some Quality Score facts to help give you more information about how to take advantage of Google’s Quality Score:

Google knows that the first three ads on each page receive more clicks and a higher CTR and they have put this information into their quality score system. So if you have an advertisement in a top three position you should be getting a high CTR. If you’re not getting a high CTR then you need to increase it. The same goes for advertisements in the last positions of a page.
After you make changes to keywords within your account don’t expect an immediate change in quality score. If you’re adjusting the keywords/bids in your account by deleting keywords or raising bids you will see changes within 3 days. If you’re having to re-design a website or change text ads then it can take up to 20 days to see changes in your quality score.