"The clickthrough rate (CTR) for this keyword does not meet the minimum performance requirement"
All of these keywords meet the mininimum CPC and show as "active" in the campaign manager, but are not running. These are keywords that have been running successfully for many months and have had no changes made to the associated ads or landing pages. Any ideas?
I've seen the same thing and find their silent dormancy most irksome. At least when they used to say "Disabled", you knew it.
How do you define "running successfully for many months"? If you look at all time or long range stats, were they getting clicks and impressions? Or do you mean Google just left them alone?
In my own experience, I find when I look at them in the long view, Google put many of them in that silent "no show" status for few or no impressions or a very low CTR. They tend to be left over from those "old fashioned" days when a nickle bid still guaranteed a showing, albeit sometimes at a low position.
Now if you find they've been running for months without impressions or clicks, do you need or want them? I've come to realize I don't always pick winners and best thing to do is dump them or re-assess them in conjunction with your ads. If you still feel they have potential, raise the bids. Worked on a few that I felt were worth keeping. Otherwise, if they weren't getting clicks, I said goodbye to them.
In the good "old fashioned" days, they would have gone "Disabled" which much of the time I could take ass a signal that they had gotten no impressions in 90 days. If that's the case, I figure it's unlikely impressions were going to start pouring in on day 91, so I'd dump them.
What's annoying now is learning about these non-showing keywords through the Ads Diagnostic Tool. I'd rather have the "Disabled" status back since it at least alerted me to keywords that were doing me no good. That despite the fact that sometimes a coveted keyword would go "Disabled" and be almost impossible to re-implement.
So my method is check the full click history for those keywords which simply stopped showing (as determined by searching for your ad). If it's poor, I go looking for better keywords to replace them with.
If, for you, "running successfully" meant they had a high CTR, then you've got something else going on. Good luck!
I've found on at least some keywords now marked "Inactive", they had a wonderful CTR, but Google just decided to raise the minimun bid to something absurd. This may have had nothing to do with landing pages. Remember, the Active/Inactive change long preceded the arbitrary "page quality score" they recently introduced.
Israel
hmmmm....
That's not consistent with the pattern I've been able to discern on those keywords that go into a "silent" state.
Any chance they went through a 60-90 period at some point with a lower CTR, say well under 2.0? I've noticed some keywords that had a CTR in the 1.n range for a while stop showing.
On the other hand, there may be no logical reason for it. We're entrusting our showings to an algo that has either 100 or 1000 factors built in, or so I've read here.
If it were me and I really wanted those keywords, I'd try in this order:
1) raise the bids even a little higher than I'm comfortable with for a while
2) email tech support and see if they come up with anything (unlikely they will) - unless trademark problem you're unaware of?
3) Delete them, create a new ad group with an ad refined just for those keywords. I realize that carry risks on a long running unchanged adgroup, but if they simply aren't going to show anyway.....
Good Luck,
Israel
"The clickthrough rate (CTR) for this keyword does not meet the minimum performance requirement"
Just one of the "features" of Google that angers me. A cynic might suggest that Google just wants to screw more money from you by having you increase the amount you pay for these keywords.
Matt
