Google Adwords Problem

[retired_member27]

I do apologise for going back on my word about not posting here again but I seem to have a rather peculiar problem with Google Adwords. First off, I've never used Adwords before so the problem might be normal.

Right, I signed up about a week ago to promote a Mobile Phone Forum that we have just started, I set all the Keywords to a maximum CPC of £0.06 and the daily budget to £10.00, and everything was fine. Whenever I typed a keyword in Google our ad was shown on the right side of the page at about position four.

Then today checking our account every single keyword (111 in all) has "Inactive for search" "Increase quality or bid £2.75 to activate". Now I've read their help on how to make the keyword active again and so forth mainly by paying £2.75 per click which we won't do as the forum is non profit.

My main concern is why all the keywords suddenly changed, yes I can see why maybe one or two keywords would increase due to other account holders bidding a higher amount on the same keyword but surely all 111 keywords changing on the same day is a bit strange. I don't want to accuse Google of any skullduggary but it would seem to me that they might have a mechanism in place to try to raise the price of all keywords in order to extract the maximum amount of money from people even if nobody else has bidded a higher amount. Would the keywords ever revert back to "active" again?

Has anyone else ever noticed the same?

 

[aqls]

If your keywords don't generate a certain degree of click through ratio e.g. above 0.25 or 0.3 ish, then Google thinks you're just getting yourself free advertising.

Change your ad to something that encourages more click throughs, add more click-through active keywords to the AdGroup and rerun.

-aqls-

 

[retired_member27]

I see, so what you saying is that if I maintain a CTR higher than 0.25 I will be OK.

 

[aqls]

should be. Depends on how the algorithm is feeling today.

-aqls-