I got this information in my email about some new Google AdWords changes. I don’t understand 100% of it but I hope it will make our lives easier.

QUALITY-BASED BIDDING

As you may know, we’ll be implementing a new keyword evaluation process in the coming weeks. With this change, we’ll simplify our keyword status system and introduce quality-based minimum bids, giving you more control to run on keywords you find important. To help you better understand and prepare for these changes, I’ve outlined them below.

HOW THE NEW SYSTEM WILL WORK

When these changes take place, each keyword will be assigned a minimum bid that is based on the quality (also called Quality Score) of your keyword and ad text specific to your account. If your keyword or Ad Group’s maximum cost-per-click (CPC) meets the minimum bid, your keyword will be active and trigger ads. If your maximum CPC doesn’t meet the minimum bid, your keyword will be inactive and not trigger ads.

KEY CHANGES

Here are the new system changes:

1. The keyword statuses normal, in trial, on hold, slowed, and disabled will be replaced with active (triggering ads) and inactive (not triggering ads). In addition, accounts will no longer be slowed. Currently, accounts are slowed when they don’t meet our performance requirements and your ads appear rarely for your keywords.
2. New keywords will no longer be disabled or have a minimum clickthrough rate (CTR) threshold. Instead, your keywords will trigger ads as long as they have a high enough Quality Score and maximum CPC. Your Quality Score is determined by your keyword’s CTR on Google, relevance of ad text, historical keyword performance, and other relevancy factors. Remember: The higher the Quality Score, the lower the bid required to trigger ads, and vice versa.
3. You can move an inactive keyword to an active state and show ads by (1) improving its Quality Score through optimization, or (2) increasing its maximum CPC to the minimum bid recommended by the system. The minimum bid will be listed in the keyword status column, below inactive keywords.

HOW TO MANAGE YOUR ACCOUNT BEFORE THESE CHANGES TAKE PLACE

If you’re happy with your current keyword list, there’s no need to make any changes. However, if you have any on hold keywords that you don’t want to trigger ads, we suggest you delete them from your account. This is because any keywords with a high enough Quality Score and maximum CPC could be activated and accrue ad clicks. You can use our Find and Edit Keywords tool, available in your account’s Tools page, to quickly search for and delete any keywords in your account.

HOW TO MANAGE YOUR ACCOUNT AFTER THESE CHANGES TAKE PLACE

We’ll email you after we implement these changes. You should then log in to your account and monitor your keywords’ performance under these new guidelines. Any disabled keywords at time of implementation will remain labeled as disabled in your account. After a few weeks, we’ll then begin deleting them. This short interval gives you the opportunity to review your disabled keywords and activate them. If you would like to keep record of your disabled keywords, we suggest that you run a report.

My Thoughts On This Change

I do not know how this will impact my Google AdWords expenses. It seems like Google AdWords are trying to get more money from us by assigning a minimum bid for certain keywords. If that is true, we might find it even harder to pay for $0.05 clicks again! Yikes!

This is how I see it… They are raising the prices of "valuable" keywords and they will only display our ads if we meet that minimum price Google has decided with its new system.

The good thing about this change is that there will be no more on hold, in trial, slowed keyword and slowed accounts. That makes is simpler for us. I never really understood these terms anyway.

I hope Google doesn’t turn into something like Yahoo Search Marketing…. Let’s wait and see what happens..

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