Starting in June 2024, Google Ads will start automatically pausing keywords that have had no impressions in the last 13 months.

What is Google changing?

This summer, Google will make a change to help advertisers clean up their ad accounts by automatically pausing ‘low-activity’ keywords after 13 months. This means that if you have keywords within your search campaigns that have not had any impressions for more than a year, then they will be paused.

It’s worth noting that you will be able to manually re-enable these keywords after they have been paused, but if they gain zero impressions for three months after that time, they will be automatically halted again.

What does this mean for you?

If you’re an advertiser, this shouldn’t affect you too much. If you have keywords in your account that haven’t generated impressions in the last 13 months then these are redundant keywords. This means that those keywords are almost never searched for in Google to trigger any ads.

You will find that most of the keywords that do not get impressions are exact match keywords that are far too niche and specific. What you can do in order to maintain control over your keywords is to upgrade your exact match keywords with no impressions to phrase, or broad match. 

You will see a status message next to a keyword with no impressions that says “eligibility limited: rarely or never shown”.

Why is Google doing this?

Ultimately this change should not have a big impact on accounts, and may even be beneficial for most advertisers as it will keep accounts running ‘cleanly’.

When managing Google Ads, if you have a large number of keywords in an ad group and many of them are not eligible due to no impressions, the keyword section can become difficult to manage.

Having fewer redundant keywords therefore makes an account more efficient to run.

Google automatically cleaning these up is a positive move in regards to the management of keywords within an ad group.

The takeaway

While Google seems to be helping advertisers by introducing a native feature that would usually require an automated quality-of-life script, they are taking away control, albeit in a very minor way, with this update. This could be a signal that Google is willing to implement automated features, and the more they do this, the less granular control advertisers have.

While this change is likely to be a minor change to advertisers, it does indicate that more substantial automations could be on the horizon. With that in mind it’s more important than ever to be familiar with Google Ads to help avoid Google taking the reins of your account.

If you have any questions about how this change might impact your Google Ads activity, get in touch with us for a chat.