How to Activate Inactive Keywords in Google AdWords

Allen walks out of a his bosses cabin with a mission in hand. He has to add another 20,000 keywords into his Google AdWords account in order to help increase volumes.

After tireless research and analysis he gets 20,000 more keywords that can be put into his account. He starts up AdWords Editor and begins to upload ads. After 2 hours, its finally up!

Next day, Allen comes into office excited, he wants to see what effect the new keywords have on the account (after all his account gets clicks and leads 24/7!!). He logins in.. to find....

18,000 keywords have gone INACTIVE!!

Now, that sucks! But, this is not the first time this has happened to any one of us. The number one Google Adwords frustration we face everyday is the inactive keyword phenomenon. Imagine spending hours of research, grouping and uploading, only to see that 90% of your work was fruitless.

What's more, highly "relevant" keywords such as "buy cellphones" have gone inactive and Google is demanding $10 to activate it. (I think that's roughly how much the conversion should cost!)

So, here are simple tricks that I have had success with in the past in activating keywords and would like to share it with you:

1. Build "tight" ad groups.

   The best way to increase relevancy and improve QS (Quality Score) is to build small, tight ad groups of no more than 30 keywords (For high volume, good ROI keywords I think it should be less than 6 keywords in an ad group (including match type variations). This helps Google better "understand" what's happening and hence, it rewards you for the same. If you have a large ad groups of 300 keywords with many inactive keywords, split them up into smaller ad groups with relevant ads.

2. Put the Keyword in Your Ad Headline.

   This has worked for me always. No exceptions. Simply put the keyword in your ad headline and see the minimum bid drop within 20 minutes. In fact, just yesterday, I witnessed the same in one of my accounts, where the minimum bid for "mutual funds" keyword was as high as Rs. 90 (This campaign was running in India, where such a keyword should be between Rs. 6 and Rs. 15), even though it is highly relevant and appears multiple times on the landing page. We simply paused all ads in the ad groups and unpaused an ad that had "Mutual Funds" in the headline. Boom.. within 20 minutes (i am not exaggerating here..) our minimum bid fell to Rs. 4.50p and within another 10 minutes it fell to Rs. 2.70p.

3. Change Your Display URL.

   Google now looks at and pays quite a lot of importance to your display URL. Change it. Test it. Use your keyword in it. The QS will improve.

4. Try putting it into another account.

   I've seen in the past on a number of occasions that by simply copy-pasting the ad group from one Google account to another, made the keywords active. This has to do with the account history that Google builds over time.

P.S. This is one of the tips that even most of the "Gurus" are not aware of!

That's it! Apply these simple steps and you are set to achieve higher volumes at lower prices.

Cheers to more "active" keywords. :)