I have an AdWords campaign. Works fine. Most bids are below a dollar. Tonight I was playing around and set up a new campaign on the same account, part of a small project to break up a big campaign into several smaller campaigns: same words, same ads, same landing pages. In the new campaigns, all the half decent keywords are inactive. "Bid $5.00 to activate." How screwed up is that?
I am guessing this is an instance where your old campaign and how competitive the marketplace is works against ALL new entries into that keyword space. so when you reorganize you may want to view it as a one time relevancy tax until your ads prove they are good...but on the other side of the coin that means other new entrants into your marketplace may be sticker shocked and scared away before they seriously invest into learning the market.
Yep, that would be my guess as well. It's the PPC version of Google's sandbox Google likes old things - AdWords campaigns and domains included