You may notice from time to time that your minimum bids move. If you’ve had a PPC campaign that all of a sudden stopped because your ads no longer met the minimum bid for the approval process then you’ve likely been frustrated by that. Yahoo! Search Marketing has a solution for you that will help you keep an eye on that minimum bid.
When you log into your account you should see a notification that lets you know your ads no longer meet the minimum bid. Let’s say you bid 10 cents for your keyword and the minimum bid is 13 cents. On your user interface within the advertising management system, you’ll see your actual bid and a red note one field to its left telling you that your bid is too low. Right below the red type you’ll the the actual minimum bid necessary to keep your ad active for that keyword.
What you do is log into your account and click on the Keywords tab. If you haven’t seen that before, it’s because that’s a new tab. But it lets you see all the keywords for your PPC ads no matter which campaign they are associated with. That’s a cool tool. Now you can see the minimum bid information described in the last paragraph. You can either raise your bid or let your ads pause for awhile. An easy way to manage all of your keywords at a glance.
Another cool feature of this new tab and new reporting tool is that your ads do not automatically go inactive right away like they do with Google AdWords. Instead, you have a grace period during which if you raise your bid to the minimum then your ads will never pause. You won’t lose a beat. If you do not raise your minimum bid, of course, then your ads will pause, but you at least have the grace period.
While your ads are pending inactive, you can raise the bids for your keywords to the minimum necessary to keep them active, but the minimums are just that. They are not minimum bids for competitive purposes, only minimum bids to keep the ads active. So be sure to remember that.
Learn more about PPC Management.
