Google Ads Keyword Status Types

Key Takeaways

if you're running search campaigns you probably want to make sure that your keywords are actually running right exactly so it's important to know what the keyword statuses are within Google ads in this video we will show you what those keyword statuses are so if you ever find out that your keywords aren't running you can get an explanation of why they're not running and how you can fix it this paid media Pros video is sponsored by optio the smarter more efficient way to manage Google ads opio's platform operates as a second pair of eyes on your accounts regularly monitoring performance Trends to make data-driven optimization suggestions for keyword strategies bid optimizations ad copy creation and more better yet you can save time by implementing their suggested changes directly in their user-friendly interface optio is extending their free trial period for paid media Pros viewers for 60 days meaning you get two full months of testing and using optio on your accounts before you pay a dime if you're interested in giving it a shot click the link on the screen right now or in the video description to get started for this video I may need to jump around onto a few different accounts that's because there are certain statuses that aren't as common so I may need to go dig around a little bit to find some examples just so I can get through all of the statuses available on the screen right now I'm in the Search keywords table for talking about keyword statuses it's pretty much the only view we're going to be in and we can see in this column I am highlighting right here there is the status column now in all of my accounts this is a locked column and what I mean by that is that if we go to columns click on it and try to modify it there we see this is locked I can't get rid of it and I shouldn't need to add it because it's already there so I can cancel out of this but for whatever reason in your view if you're not seeing status then head up to columns and see if you can add it but the one we see right at the top this is the status you always want eligible that means the keyword is running there aren't any issues no additional action is needed but I'm sure you've already seen on the screen within the status column there are a few other status options and if you look at the numbers to the right of the status column these keywords are still running and and one status as eligible but oddly another one says not eligible so we're going to cover these the red status here that I am highlighting is eligible limited and there are a variety of different reasons why your keywords could be eligible limited but as we go through these statuses I do want to let you know that you can add a filter and then just type in status we already covered eligible so now let's look at filtering by the keywords that are eligible limited click apply and here we see a few options I'm going to sort it a little differently and here's one option this one keyword in the account is eligible but it's not showing up because I'm using manual bidding within this campaign in my first page bid is too low nothing is paused I'm not violating any policies it's just too competitive so I need to bid more so I'll just head over to my Mac CPC in this case I'll need to make sure it's at least two dollars and thirty cents but I'm going to go a little bit higher and then click save since I did that the status was automatically changed to eligible and since I increased my bids I should start seeing more Impressions and hopefully a higher press and share now the other options that are in red that we see on the screen right now are still eligible to show but they're rarely being shown due to having a low quality score I could say right now the keywords on the screen are coming from a competitor campaign so the keywords that we're targeting which are the competitors names and the competitors products are not being used within our ad copy of course Google doesn't like that only some of them have the competitor's name on the landing page when we're doing some comparisons if we're able to other landing pages don't mention the keywords so our relevancy scores are definitely lower hence our quality scores are lower we can still try to optimize as best as possible for click-through rate without including these key phrases within our ads in our landing page it's going to be tough to beat this low quality score but if you see we are still being shown and we are getting a little bit more aggressive within our bids Google's going to tell you two things of course they're going to try to tell you to improve your ad copy improve your landing page experience to increase your quality score and then you'll be eligible to show more often that is the ideal route but Google may also recommend that you remove these keywords from the account and that's something I don't agree with when considering the scenario I just mentioned we're going to go after our competitors names and products we're not going to remove these keywords just because Google says so so while we understand we're going to have low impression share we're going to have to bid higher it's an Initiative for this client so just because they give us the red status warning and saying we have a low quality score doesn't mean it's absolutely horrible we at least have an understanding of why this keyword isn't being shown all the time so if we go up to the ad status again sorry I should have said the status filter and potentially there's another filter that you may want to use that is going to be status reason because another eligible limited status is low search volume so click apply I know this one is weird because when you're in Google ads they claim it's not eligible however in official Google ads documents and from what we could see low search volume doesn't always mean not eligible we're still showing up it just means that not a lot of people are searching for queries that relate to the keywords that we're targeting so there's a few things you may want to do here this is when I would possibly consider widening my match types and if you're already going after just exact or you are going after exact and phrase this is when you may want to consider broad match if the theme of the keywords that you're targeting are all low search volume you're being too specific so find new keywords or broaden your match type if this is an important area for your account remember search doesn't build demand you can only capitalize on the demand that's out there for when people are actually searching for it so maybe you do need to run some other higher level video campaigns display campaigns whatever to try to build awareness so people actually start searching for what you're trying to Target that may be low search volume it's going to be tough that's totally an account by account basis but for any keywords where I'm still seeing Impressions while it may not be a lot I'm just going to see how performance is if we're still getting good engagement and every once in a while you are still getting conversions I'm going to leave those keywords in there if I see something like these four keywords that are pulling up zeros I'm going to change my date range maybe go back a several months maybe go back an entire year and this is a cleanup task I do every once in a while in all of my client accounts there are a bunch of keywords in there that are low search volume have not gained any impressions in a long time they're just clocking up your account remove them from your account completely and start focusing on the areas that are actually going to make a difference one thing that also pops into my mind should have mentioned earlier is that maybe you've turned off search Partners it could be another way to safely test expanding your reach using your current keywords if they are low volume it is a default setting that is automatically turned on when creating a search campaign but maybe sometime in the past you did turn off search Partners consider turning it back on especially if your keywords are getting low volume and as I already said it could be an important area to your account that you want to grow and if you want to learn more about search Partners you can watch this video here but let me remove this filter and as we see I have it sorted by just enabled keywords so let's say I wanted to pause this particular keyword click on the status drop down and choose pause while it still says low search volume paused is another status and it's pretty straightforward Google didn't pause this keyword either you paused it manually or you had some sort of automated rule that paused the keyword for you so it's pretty clear and easy pause status means your keyword is no longer running it will no longer gain Impressions and no longer adding any additional costs now there's another option within this drop down and that is going to be to remove the keyword and I'm not even going to DARE highlighting that one because I do not want this keyword removed removing keywords is almost like deleting it from your account I say almost because if you remove it you can't re-enable it you cannot bring that keyword back however the removed keywords will still be within your account so you can review historical information removed keywords only live within Google ads for a certain amount of time I want to say it's two years before Google actually removes it from the account but if I'm wrong about that let me know in the comments correct me so removed will be a status that lives within this column if you decide to remove any keywords I'm going to enable this one again for the next status I to happen to a different account because now it's time to talk about why your ads are not being shown and this view covers a few different things I'm still in the Search keywords View and we can see with the green dots that I have these keywords active however I'm also looking at the campaign status of campaigns that are both enabled and paused so we see here it's not eligible because the campaign is paused I'll admit I have these moments every once in a while like how come these keywords aren't running and then I realize oh yeah that's right we paused this campaign or you paused the ad group within a campaign so if you want to run a keyword first thing you should probably do is make sure that the campaign and AD group are both enabled if you're on the search keyword view the same thing would apply if you have ever removed a campaign or removed an ad group then your keyword would not be eligible and there's really no way to make it eligible again even if you've never removed the keyword you're going to have to recreate the campaign and AD group and put the keyword within a brand new campaign again the pausing and removing at the camp painted ad group level are things that you will have to do yourself Google won't do it for you but they can affect your keyword status of not showing or not being eligible now maybe you just glossed over that first reason of why I said your ads aren't eligible because you're looking at the disapproved status that's on the screen right now I know my client tried to do something a little risque going after certain topics and themes that have curse words in them not a fan of it but they wanted to try it so their ads were disapproved because they violated one of Google's policies and if you hover over why your ad is disapproved they tell me which policy we violated then you can click on the link and if I scroll down I can find the policy of why our keyword was disapproved and then I could actually see if it's possible to bring it back in this case there is no way for me to bring this keyword back strictly due to this policy so for this client they might as well just remove this keyword from the account now you can watch this video that's popping up on the screen right now if you want to learn a little bit more about about ad policies and violations it doesn't cover every single ad policy but it does cover some of the common reasons of why your ads could be disapproved so disapprovals the ad status of why your ad isn't being shown because you are violating a Google ads policy and then back to a different account because I'm just gonna have to use the filters for here I'm going to choose status reason scrolling down we see the option for campaign pending click apply and I knew this account wouldn't have anything but let's say you're planning ahead you're creating a search campaign that has a launch date in the future I believe Google calls it a start date well if the campaign hasn't started yet of course your keyword is not going to be eligible to show so any inactive keywords because the campaign is scheduled for a future date will show a status of campaign pending and then there's just one more I want to click on the filter again status reason and that is going to be under review I'm not even going to click apply because nothing's going to show up under this account as well but maybe you had certain disapprovals and you filled in a request to have maybe the campaign mean the keyword the ad group manually reviewed just to try to bring it back to eligible status while it's being reviewed you will have the under review status and Google says this can take up to one business day but I've definitely seen reviews take longer with the under review status your ads will not be shown and thus your keywords will not be shown so it's technically another not eligible option so those are the types of statuses that you may see within your account in Google ads we always strive for eligible status but we always understand that things happen if your ads are not eligible to show at least Google tells you why they're not shown and if you highlight over the status I'll give Google a lot of credit here they give you a good amount of information to show you why you're hitting the not eligible status and what you can do to fix it you really can't get more straightforward than that so as always if you have any questions on what status options are or what you may be seeing in your keyword view let us know in the comments thanks for watching our video we really appreciate it if you liked it give us a thumbs up below if you really really liked it maybe think about subscribing to the paid media Pros YouTube channel and you'll get alerted every time a new video drops if you really really liked it you can help support the channel by checking out some of the t-shirts that we're wearing on our merch shelf as well as looking at the super thanks button foreign