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Integrated Digital Marketing Solutions | EXPLORE SERVICES

Why Are My Ads Not Showing?

One of the questions we sometimes get from our clients as they are searching away for their brand name or main keywords – why are my ads not showing? Luckily there’s no need to panic! Here are the most likely reasons why your ad is not showing in your search results:

 

  1. Budget. Each AdWords campaign gets a certain dollar amount of budget per day. Best case scenario, we exhaust that daily budget, as that means your ads are generating impressions, and users are clicking on your ads. Especially if you are searching for your ads later in the day, there’s a good chance that the campaign has run out of its budget and therefore can no longer show in eligible searches.

 

  1. Your Search Behavior. You’ve been searching for this term too much. Let’s say you sell widgets. If you keep searching for the term ‘widgets’ and never click on your ad (which we hope you NEVER click on your own ad!) Google will stop showing you that ad as they see your lack of engagement and therefore would rather show other ads that you might click on instead.

 

  1. Low Ad Rank. Every ad in AdWords gets an Ad Rank from Google. The factors that go into this rank include bid, expected Click-Through-Rate, ad relevance (how relevant the keyword and ad are to the searcher) and Landing Page experience (where the user is being taken to after clicking on the ad). When a random user searches for ‘widgets’ and Google decides that someone else’s ad is more relevant to that search based on the Ad Rank, they will show the other ad as opposed to yours.

So, what can be done to get your ad to show more?

If your ad is not showing due to a budget-related issue, we either need to raise your budget so your ads can be shown more often or we need to discuss re-allocating the existing budget to give more money to higher performing ads or for campaigns that are more important to you.

If your ads are not showing due to low Ad Rank we can work on our end to increase the relevance between keywords and ad copy, and you can work on your end to better the experience of the user by optimizing your Landing pages.

Even better, give us a call! AdWords has this great tool “Ad Preview and Diagnosis” which will give you a real-time gauge of how and if your ads are showing. If the ads aren’t showing, the tool will even tell you whether it is because of ad rank or limited budget. After checking this tool, we can then discuss if we’d rather spend the time and effort to improve Ad Rank (which is a longer process) or increase your budget to gain a more desirable position in the search results.