How dormant should you leave your Adwords volcano?
Many businesses or companies use Google Adwords on a regular basis and this advertising platform is a regular part of their business plan. Some do not however. This could be for a variety of reasons including:
* Work may be seasonal or Adwords is only used to push certain important events.
* Some ‘mix and match’ it with other types of advertising and so only use Adwords periodically.
* The business needs have changed and paid advertising hasn’t become necessary at that time, though there is scope for it to be reignited later.
From now, Google have taken the step and decided to deactivate any Adwords accounts that haven’t spent any money for the last 15 months. This is different to what sometimes happens in these situations where signing in is sufficient in order to avoid deactivation.
To all users this happens to, an email notice will be sent by Google Adwords informing that deactivation has occurred. If this happens it is not the end of the world as account holders can sign in and reactivate their account at any time by following the prompts under the settings and preferences sections. Note that for 24 hours you may still see a deactivated sign, but you will be able to use Adwords normally again thereafter. The only restriction this time is you must spend money within 3 months or your account will be deactivated again.
Why is this being done?
Google have decided to take this step in an attempt to speed up the Adwords experience presumably by creating extra capacity in making accounts which are not used dormant. How many accounts this will apply to and therefore how it improves the user experience is not clear nor have any examples of this been given anywhere. It will be shortly seen if there is a fundamental and noticeable difference to regular users functionality on the platform.
What could this change mean?
Deactivating an account which hasn’t spent any money for 15 months doesn’t exactly sound like headline news and also sounds quite fair and reasonable not to impact on a wide audience.
Remember that this is just a first step, and like many restriction rules, it is likely to get tighter rather than looser over time. So what could happen next?
Firstly the 15 month period could drop to 12 months or less. This would then bring in the seasonal users and potentially a lot more people could easily find their AdWords account deactivated.
Secondly Google might start imposing budget limits and deactivating accounts that don’t meet this threshold. It would be unfair and unpopular, but it would ensure that only those with decent pockets use their facility and provide them with the best revenue perhaps?
Thirdly, Google may introduce some kind of performance targets to ensure that only the best ads rank and generate the most revenue. This is partly done now to some extent – a kind of league table of adverts. The difference here would be that the quality of your ads could determine whether your account is kept alive – again unpopular but possible.
This is all hypotheses, and to what extent any of these may apply when the attitude could be that some revenue is better than no revenue at all will be a certain fine line. It will be interesting to see what future changes are made around this area however.
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