Min Bid Changes in Your Account Interface

Find out more about the new tools that can help you manage your bids

“WIIFM,” as most people know, is not your local Lite Rock radio station, but an acronym for the question “What’s In It For Me?”. And WIIFM is what most advertisers want to know anytime we announce a new product, feature or change related to Sponsored Search.

This certainly holds true when it comes to our recent change to the way minimum bids are determined. It really boils down to How will I know if my minimum bids are changing? and Knowing that information, what should I do?.

How You’ll Know if Your Minimum Bids are Changing
A change to minimum bids is important information that you need to find easily. As a result, we’ve literally plastered it all over the account interface—you’d have to work pretty hard not to see it if you’re logged into your account.

The first place you may spot a change is on your Dashboard page. If you have one or more keywords with bids that are below a new minimum amount, you will receive a message in the Dashboard Alerts section, as well as an email. You’ll have a grace period of up to several days to adjust your bids, so that your keywords can stay active. Conversely, we’ll also send alerts when the minimum bid has dropped and your previously inactive keywords are now active.

You can find info on any below-minimum bids on our account-level keyword page, which is itself a nifty new page that lets you look at all keywords in your account, regardless of the campaign or ad group in which they reside. Bids that are either inactive or about to become inactive are highlighted in red in the “Status” column:

Similar status columns have been added to other keyword and ad group pages throughout your account. You can also search for affected keywords with an Advanced Search from a keyword or ad group page, which now lets you filter your keywords by keyword status.

OK, Now What Do I Do With this Information?
During a grace period, your ads will continue to be eligible to be displayed, and the keyword will be displayed with the status “Pending Inactive, Bid Too Low” in the account interface.

After the grace period ends, if you have not raised your bid to at least the new minimum, the keyword will be displayed with the status “Inactive, Bid Too Low” in the account interface. (You can see both of these statuses—or should that be “statii”—in the screen shot above.)

The important thing to remember here is that the only way you can make a “Pending Inactive” or “Inactive” keyword immediately active again is to raise the bid to your required minimum. Increasing the quality of the ads associated with the keyword in question can generally help lower your minimum bid, but not until we recalibrate that minimum bid. So if you don’t want your keyword to go offline at all, you should raise your bid before the grace period ends.

If you decide to increase your bid on a “Pending Inactive” keyword, the new bid takes effect immediately, and your ads become active as soon as your bid meets or exceeds your minimum bid required for that keyword.

To take the “sledge-hammer approach” to increasing your bids above the minimum, use the bulk bidding tool. You start by checking the box next to the keywords you want to adjust, and click “Set Keyword Bids”. This will take you to the page pictured below, where you can raise the selected keyword bids to a level that will meet all of the minimum bid requirements for those keywords.

But remember, with this tool you’re only raising each bid to the minimum needed to stay active, not necessarily to the price that will make you competitive for that keyword.

If you discover that your minimum bids have decreased, you can always lower your bids on those keywords, understanding that by doing so you may end up dropping position in search results and reduce your traffic from that keyword.

Higher or lower, active or inactive, you’re now able to easily see what’s going on with minimum bids in your account, and take action.

— Jeff Hecox