This may has happen to you: just setup a new ad group in your Google Adwords account, inserted a few of your well researched keywords and placed your bids. Then some of your keywords appeared as inactive, it's ok with you because you didn't want to pay that much for them, but still received clicks and got charged. What the hell?

I prefer to use the same bid for a whole ad group, bids are easier to manage that way. In a few special cases I use a different bid for some keywords if I know they'll perform well.

And how do I get inactive keywords behaving like active in Google Adwords?

Let's say I've put a bid of 5 cents for my ad group and some keywords ask for 10 or 20 cents to become active. It's natural to assume that if I don't want to spend that much I can leave the keywords as inactive and problem solved, right? Wrong!

I got clicks and was charged for inactive keywords in one of my 5 cents groups, some of them costed as much as 35 cents and when I asked Google they told me it was due to the “dynamic nature of Adwords”. I can understand the dynamic nature, Adwords is a dynamic system, but Google should be more clear about this. Is Google really forgetting to tell their users or is just a not so ethical way of making a few more pennies, millons of them?

In my case it was just a few dollars because I was reviewing each one of my Adwords groups for this campaign, and I don't have much, just around fifty, but the inactive Adwords keywords getting active issue could be a huge money bleeding problem for bigger campaigns which are not followed too close.

My Google rep recommended me to delete the inactive keywords to be sure they don't get clicks. Yeah right! Of course I had already done that way before I got the reply.

So, let's update our understanding of what inactive means for Google Adwords, it's not really inactive, it's actually a “you could be charged for this even if you don't want to” state. Pretty blurry, uh?

There you have it, delete your inactive Google Adwords keywords if you want to take care of your precious pay per click budget, at least until the G guys fix the problem.