Why isn’t my advert showing at the moment in Google AdWords?
Posted by clairejarrett | Posted in Adwords, Questions, troubleshooting | Posted on 18-02-2010
Tags: ad not showing, ads, google adwords, problens, troubleshooting
5
This is a very common question asked by new advertisers.
So here’s a list of potential reasons it might not be showing:
- Your account is new, and you have not entered payment details. When you have entered payment details, they take a short while to be authorised. This can be up to a day or two.
- You have set up a new campaign with new ad groups and keywords, that need to be reviewed. This can take a short while.
- Your daily budget has run out. Even though it might not appear to have run out, Google AdWords sometimes takes a short while (around half an hour) to catch up with very busy markets.
- You are in a different geographical area than the area your adverts are set to run in. If you have set your adverts to run in England, and you’re in Wales – you will not be able to see them! Likewise if you have used geographical targetting to target specific cities, if you are not in the city in question you will not be able to see the adverts.
- Your Campaign Settings are set to divide the budget up throughout the day. This is known as Delivery Method. This means your campaign is under-funded and Google chooses to show the adverts during part of the day only to avoid the budget expiring too soon.
- You have scheduled your adverts to run at certain times of day only – and you are not searching within those hours.
- You have chosen Position Preferences that cannot be accommodated at the moment. For example if you have chosen Position Preference 1 to 3, and your bid is not high enough, the advert will not show at all, as it cannot be shown in your preferred position.
- Your Quality Score is too low, and your bid too low to result in the advert showing. If your QS is low, this is likely to be due to poor advert/keyword matching along with a poor quality landing page. You need to increase your QS (you will likely need the services of an AdWords Specialist) and increase the bid prices in the short term until QS improves.
- You have entered negative keywords that conflict with the keywords you have chosen. For example, if you have a negative keyword of free and a keyword phrase in your campaign of “free AdWords ebook”, your advert will not show.
Having said all this, you should NOT actually be searching Google to view your ads, as this drives impressions up and Click Through rate down. Instead, use the Ad Preview Tool in Google.
Or as I found out througha silly mistake, your ads are suspended. I did not realize but you are only allowed one account to advertise, I opened 5 and did not realize I was suspended until I asked them why my ads were not running, I was lucky they gave me an account to work with, so that could be another reason.
Absolutely. I do have a couple of accounts I must admit, but that’s because I have different websites for different services.
Picking up on geographical areas point
If you set your google ads to show in England and not GB for example – it will still appear on google but it will tell you in google adwords ads are not showing because they are set to a location.
I questioned google on this and they said ads would still be showing but would say this. Slight bug but worth knowing as you may be confused if it says they aren’t showing but inactual fact are.
The ad preview tool won’t work it if you have a geographical area set, certainly. It shouldn’t tell you that your ads are not showing though, just that it cannot check the status?
Thank you for these, must admit I know about most but still useful to know the rest!
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