You’ve meticulously planned and prepared your new Google Ads Search campaign, but it’s been live for days now and you’re still not seeing any Impressions coming through.
What do you do?
First of all, don’t panic! Google Ads can be a complex platform to get right, and there are lots of levers involved in ensuring your ads get up and running. It is not uncommon for new campaigns to have teething issues which need resolving in order for them to start to see Impressions and Clicks trickling through.
Your next step is to go through each of the following sections thoroughly to see if any of them are relevant to your campaign. It is important that you do a deep dive on these, as unfortunately it only takes a small issue to stop yours ads from being eligible to appear.
1. Suspended Ads Account
If Google Ads finds you in violation of one of their policies, then your account may be suspended. A suspended account can not run ads, and you will not be able to create new content such as campaigns or ad groups. Whilst advertisers will receive an email to inform them of the suspension, this can be easily missed in busy inboxes. However, if you log into your account and it is suspended, then you will see a red warning banner at the top of the page.
Google Ads will not tell you the specific reason why you have been suspended, only the policy which your infringement applies to. If your account is suspended, then it is important that you make the relevant changes to your business practices, campaigns or ads before submitting a suspension appeal, so make sure you research the suspension carefully.
If after you submit your appeal, Google feels that you are no longer in violation of their policies, then your account will be reinstated and your ads will be eligible to show again.
2. Disapproved Google Ads
If your ads are disapproved then they won’t be eligible to run.
You can check to see if your ads are disapproved by navigating to the ad section and looking at the ‘Status’ column. If you see a ‘Disapproved’ then hover over this message and a pop up box will appear, giving you more information about why it is disapproved.
Make sure you address the reason for the disapproval by editing your ad. Once you click ‘Save’ it will be resubmitted for review.
3. Ads in Review
It can take up to 2 full working days for your ads to complete the review process. This means that any campaign you create will not be immediately eligible to run.
There is nothing that advertisers can do to speed up this process, so this needs to be kept in mind if you are wishing to launch a time sensitive campaign
If it has been over 2 full working days and the ads are still under review then this will need to be reported to Google.
4. Low or No Search Volume
It is important that the keyword lists you use are relevant to your product or service, but it is also important that they are terms with sufficient search volumes. If there are no or too small searches for your keywords then they won’t be triggered, and therefore your ads won’t be eligible to show.
You can check your keywords by looking at the ‘Status’ column for your keyword list.
If you are repeatedly seeing ‘Not Eligible – Low Search Volume’ or ‘Eligible (Limited) – Low Search Volume’ then you should consider expanding your keyword list, as this means that your ads are having little or no opportunities to show. Try using Google Ads Keyword Planner to find relevant keywords for your product or service, with a larger volume of average monthly searches.
5. Insufficient Budget
Gone are the days of super low CPCs, where a £5 a day budget could get most SMB’s a healthy volume of site visitors. Now it is much more difficult to get good performance from a limited budget.
In some cases, the average CPC for your keyword might be more expensive than the campaign’s daily budget, meaning that it doesn’t have a chance to enter the auction process at all. For example, if you have a £3 a day daily budget for your new Search campaign, and the average CPC for the keyword is £3.75, then your ad isn’t going to show.
To get a better understanding as to whether or not your budget is sufficient, have a look at the Google Ads Keywords Planner and have a look at the historical costs for the keywords you are bidding on over recent months. If there is an issue between how expensive a keyword is and your existing budget you can do one of two things: 1. Increase your budget or 2. Switch more expensive keywords for lower costing ones. It can be a tricky balance between using keywords which are right for your campaign and the ones which you can afford, but don’t be tempted to just add cheaper keywords if they are not relevant to what you are promoting.
6. Troubleshooting
If you are confident that you have covered each of the potential issues above and are still having problems, then your next step would be to use this Google Ads troubleshooting tool.
This tool can help you to identify why your ads are not showing, but it is limited with regards to functionality. It may however provide you with the option to speak to customer support, who may be able to take a look at your account and help identify the issue. Please note: due to changes in Google Ads customer support services, you will not always be given the option to speak to someone.
Should you have exhausted all of the potential issues listed, not identified the cause through the troubleshooter tool and have had no success with customer support, then your next step would be to get some external support. Sometimes the root of the problem is not immediately apparent, so by working with a Google Ads specialist, you can have access to the skills and knowledge needed to investigate your campaign and account thoroughly.
