Google Adwords have just announced that they will be doing away with the “On Hold” status in the accounts. Instead, each keyword will receive a quality score and will be displayed IF the max CPC and expected quality of the keyword meets their requirements.
The following excerpts are taking directly from Google:
Key changes
The keyword statuses normal, in trial, on hold, and disabled will be replaced with active (triggering ads) or 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.
New keywords will no longer be disabled or have a minimum clickthrough rate (CTR) threshold. Instead, your keyword will trigger ads as long as it has a high enough Quality Score (determined by your keyword’s CTR, relevance of ad text, historical keyword performance, and other relevancy factors) and maximum CPC.
Ad Rank, or the position of your ad, will continue to be based on the maximum CPC and quality (now called the Quality Score).
Remember: The higher the Quality Score, the lower the CPC required to trigger ads, and vice versa.
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 next generation of keyword evaluation
We’ve been hearing that our keyword states are confusing… In the coming weeks, we’re aiming to change all that. Read on to learn about changes we’ll be making to our keyword evaluation system, as told by Bindu R., an AdWords Product Manager.
We heard from you that trying to advertise with our current keyword states is like playing keyword roulette. You never know what keyword state will be assigned, and you sometimes can’t run on your most important keywords. In the coming weeks we’ll make changes to simplify our keyword states and give you more control to run on the keywords that you find valuable. Here are the improvements that you’ll see:
Simplified Keyword States: Keywords will be placed in to one of two states – active or inactive. People like the idea of something that’s a little more binary - on/off, day/night, hot/cold – you get the picture.
Increased Control: We’re replacing the static USD $0.05 minimum bid for all keywords with a minimum bid that varies based on the quality of your keyword and ad text. High quality keywords (determined by the Quality Score) will have minimum bids as low as $0.01, while keywords with a lower Quality Score will be assigned higher minimum bids. As long as the maximum CPC meets the minimum bid, your keyword will be active. You no longer have to worry about on hold, in trial, or disabled keywords.
We’re giving you the control you asked for so you can run on the keywords that are important to your business.
