What is Google AdWords Keyword Status?

Posted: December 7, 2003

The click through rate that matters in determining if your ad is meeting the minimum requirements to continue to be shown is based on the click through rate of your ad on Google.com only.

Google AdWords does not publish the exact CTR rate of your words for Google alone, it shows your CTR rate for all searches, content ads, or the keywords combined CTR rate.

The keyword status is an indicator of how your ad is doing on Google’s main site - which is the one that matter for keeping your ad performing.

There are five categories for keyword status.

Strong: Congratulations, your keyword is in an excellent position. There is no risk to this keyword being disabled or not showing.

Moderate: Your ad is doing well, but there is room for improvement. This CTR rate will keep your ad being shown on a regular basis, but with better ad copy you could increase it to a strong keyword rating.

At Risk: This is a warning message. If you keyword falls into this category, your AdWords visibility is at risk. Keywords in this category still meet the minimum Google CTR rate, but just barely. These keyword ads need immediate attention so your keyword continues performing.

Slowed: Google bases CTR rate on the past one thousand impressions. Slowed keywords have not meet Google’s minimum CTR rate for that time period. These ads are still displayed on an intermittent basis, and are not getting the maximum visibility possible. These keyword ads need a lot of work to bring them out of this state. Once you make the necessary changes, you can click on the ‘restore’ button to show these ads again. Note, there is a charge for restoring full delivery to ads.

Disabled: These keywords have stopped being displayed completely. You have a few options at this point.

1. Keep the keyword disabled
2. Delete the keyword (deleting keywords) and ad it to another ad group.
3. Change the matching option for the keyword to Exact or Phrase match.
4. Modify the keyword. This is usually best done by adding another descriptive term to the keyword.
To learn more about managing keywords and optimizing ads, please see our Creating Your Own Pay Per Click Account page.