Thursday, Google announced through their blog, that they are about to introduce a major change on all inactive keywords.

By activating all inactive keywords, they seem to be letting the customer pay for tweaking minimum bids, and by doing this, Google will further punish less conscious advertisers and reward those who are aware of their system. Google is likely to see a spike in their income in the coming and following weeks. Google says: "The new per-query evaluation of Quality Score affects you in that keywords will no longer appear as 'inactive for search' in your account. Instead, all keywords will have the chance to show ads on Google web search and the search network (unless you've paused or deleted them). Keep in mind, however, that keywords previously marked 'inactive for search' are not likely to accrue a great deal of traffic following this change. This is because their combined per-query Quality Score and bid probably isn't high enough to gain competitive placement."

'First page bid' will replace 'minimum bid'

"As a result of migrating to per-query Quality Score, we are no longer showing minimum bids in your account. Instead, we're replacing minimum bids with a new, more meaningful metric: first page bids. First page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results on Google web search. They're based on the exact match version of the keyword, the ad's Quality Score, and current advertiser competition on that keyword. Based on your feedback, we learned that knowing your minimum bid wasn't always helpful in getting the ad placement you wanted, so we hope that first page bids will give you better guidance on how to achieve your advertising goals."

"It's worth mentioning that the impact of these changes will vary from advertiser to advertiser; some might see no changes to their ad serving, while others may see a noticeable difference. As always, we recommend optimizing ads to prevent them from receiving a low Quality Score."

You can read the entire blogpost here:

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/08/quality-score-improvements.html

/Angela Wickenberg