One of the most asked questions is how do I check if my ads are running or not?
I recently had somebody put in one of our Facebook groups and in fact, the link is on
the video along the bottom edge in the Facebook group which is free to join and if you are
interested please do so and join in.
When somebody asked about that they've got 3 million impressions and his boss is asking
him that he hasn't seen any of the ads.
So what shall he do?
And what the boss has done is asked all the office staff to search for the ads to see
if the ads are running or not.
Which is absolutely not the right way to do this.
So these are the things which happens with a lot of freelancers, in-house marketing team,
professionals or in fact anybody running their own ads.
A lot of self-employed businesses or entrepreneurs will ask the same question.
I never see my ads.
So there are lots of ways and reasons why this is happening.
So I'm going to go through all these reasons and hopefully by the end of this session
you will know why your ads aren't running.
So let's dive in.
The screen is fine.
Okay.
So this is one of the most important things not to do is never search for your own ads
to see if they're running or not.
There is a tool in the Google Ads interface which I will show you in a minute and the
reason why you don't want to do that is you are going to affect your CTR because even
if the ads are running your searching and your ads show up you're not going to click
on your ads so it's going to decrease the CTR which will affect the quality score is
going to go wrong or go down your ad rank is going to suffer, your CPCs are going to
go high so everything will head in the wrong way so if you do really do want to see whether
your ads are running or not is use the Ad Preview tool in the Google Ads interface and
definitely if you are a head of the department or the boss of a company never tell your staff
to go in and search because if few hundred staff start searching for your ads and your
ad do show up and they don't click on it or some of them do click it will waste your budget
obviously and when they don't click your CTR is going to get affected.
Secondly, Google is in the business of making money, right?
They are going to run more ads which get the most clicks or the CTR is high enough.
So, when Google sees we logged into our Google Ads account they know Google knows who we are.
And Google sees that we keep searching the same keywords or similar types of keywords
but never click.
What's going to happen Google is going to stop showing you the ads and then you will
wonder why my ads aren't running so never do that the way to do this if you really want
to find out whether your ads are running or not is you go into your account, going to
your tools and settings, under planning, Ad Preview and Diagnosis.
Now this is a test account so I can't run a search but all you do is you search your
buy running shoes or something like that.
Let's see what happens.
And then you put in the location.
You will get an image like this and a message whether your ad is running or not.
If it's not running it's going to go in the red.
If it's running it's going to come in green.
And then you will get a preview of the ad over here.
If it is running you can also see the results.
But because I don't have these keywords in my account right now.
So you won't get the results.
So you can see how it works.
So this is an easy way and you can tell as many people as you want to do this but obviously,
they need to have access to the Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool.
You don't need to tell anyone.
You can just go in by yourself and see if it's running or not.
The other thing obviously is the budget which we're going to come on to in a minute because
at the top point of searching your budget might have run out.
Alright, the next thing is billing problems.
So, check that your credit card or your debit card bank is all set up properly.
The payment hasn't been declined because these things do happen and it's all running fine
you may have reached your payment what's happened to your threshold.
That the ads have stopped running or you may have reached your current billing period.
So if there are any issues with the billing then all you need to do is to go back into
your account and then you go into billing and then you can go into settings, set up
your billing, check everything is fine and working okay.
Okay.
The next reason is very low or low bids if you don't bid aggressively then your competitors
are going to outrank you in the auction Google Ads is an auction you will have hundreds or
thousands of advertisers bidding for those same keywords and Google has got the own way
of calculating the top four why should those four advertisers go through to the auction
and their ads are shown and in a specific order the advertiser with the highest ad rank
will be ranked number 1, 2, 3 and 4 and then the rest will be at the bottom of the page
which you really don't want to be because nobody clicks at the bottom of the page you
really want to be at the top so if you are bidding very low so whether you are running
a Manual CPC campaign or an Automated bidding strategy both of them are the same.
If you find that your budget is not being used up every day.
So let's say you're running $100 a day and you're only spending $40 a day.
That means there's enough wiggle or enough room to scale the campaign.
So you need to increase your bids.
If you are running on Target ROAS or Target CPA, you do the same thing.
Be very aggressive.
Now, let's go back one step and lets for argument's sakes you are bidding £5 a click.
And you're not getting any much traffic.
What you want to do is to try at £6, £7, maybe £10.
But let's say even if you don't get enough traffic and you want to get traffic straight
away, you want to see where's that sweet spot where you're getting the traffic.
So if you bid at £20 or £25 that does not mean that Google is going to charge you £20
or £25 per click.
What it is going to tell Google is that you are willing to pay Google £20 a click but
with the way the CPC ads are calculated you are only going to be charged one penny more
than the second-best advertiser.
So if the second-best advertisers after Google has taken into account all the ad rank, the
bids, quality score and all that and let's say for argument sake his CPC is coming to
his or her CPC is coming to £6.85.
If you are bidding enough and you got the higher ad rank then you are only going to
be charged £6.86 and not £20 or £25 you are bidding.
So bid high, bid aggressive and you are going to beat your competition without much problem
and then your ads are going to show up.
And I should add one more thing over here.
Low bids or high bids.
What I mean by that?
I've just told you to increase your bids.
And this is what I mean by the high bids.
Let's say take this up a bit so I've got some space over here.
Let’s see your daily budget is £20.
Yeah, per day. I'll just put that.
And your bid, your Manual CPC with your bidding.
£25 or £30 let's say £30.
so if your bids are high or your actual CPC in the account after you've been running for
a while you can see that my average CPC is £30 or something like that I should change
that too Avg.
CPC is £30 there is no way your ads are going to run because you don't have enough budget
so for it to run you need to have at least five clicks worth of budget every day.
So if your average CPC is £30 then you want to put in £150 per day.
So it's either bidding too low which will not run your ads or too high and it's because
you don't have enough daily budget.
So if that is the case then you need to go after possibly long-tail keywords which will
then get you a cheaper click but with the long tail, you'll get the low volume as well.
Oh, I did put in high bids over here.
So I apologise for that. Alright.
Alright, so that's done.
And then which it we come down to the low keyword search volume.
So when you have got and this is especially true for local searches for so if you are
running a campaign for a dentist, plumber, carpenter or a shop or a restaurant.
These are very local campaigns these are not national nobody is going to come to see a
dentist from the other side of the country unless they specialize in something and others
can't offer what you offer them so these local campaigns usually are very low keyword search
volume so how you would find that is you go back into your Google Ads account
go to planning, keyword planner And let's say dentist for kids.
I don't know why it's not showing.
Okay, now it's starting to show.
Alright.
Now obviously I have put in the whole of the UK but you can then change it to your target
location.
I'm going to put it in my location which is very small.
This is where we are in a small town called Leighton Buzzard in by reach here now all
of a sudden my searches are very low what we tend to do is not to go after any keywords
which have got less than 100 but as you can see most of them are all 10 you can try these
but you will find that when you are running it they are all coming up as low volume keyword
so they are not going to run anywhere so you need to start doing something different perhaps
away from the search network and this is why I keep going on about video ads.
Excuse me.
With video, display, search you can target your local areas or communities without any
problems and what no matter how much reasonable a budget you have it will get used up whereas
with a search campaign you may struggle to spend the budget and get more leads or sales
for your clients so you need to expand its go on Gmail and all these places where you
can show your ads right so this is where we don't want to be going after the such low
volume keywords nothing is going to happen the client is going to get frustrated and
so will you.
The next one is the Ad scheduling problem that makes sure that you have scheduled and
not by accident put in a weird schedule of like running ads from 8 AM to 10 AM instead
of 8 AM to 10 PM. Alright.
So that is another way where potentially your ads can literally stop running and then you
will be pulling your hair out.
Oh my god, why aren't my ads running?
I've checked everything.
Do check the ad schedule as well that you have you are running your ads when you want
your ads to run through.
So if you want to run ads for or during office time, 9 to 5, check it.
You don't want to run ads on the weekend, stop them or you do want the ads to run through
on the weekend as well, then make sure it's all set up properly.
There are other ways you can easily stop your ads from running and this is one of the most
common problems is when you are a little bit too trigger happy putting in negative keywords
and you forget that you put in a negative keyword which you are using as well.
Now on in the recommendations tab, you will find and that's one of the good things which
I do like about the recommendations tab over here you will find that Google will give you
a reminder or a pop-up message that your keyword is being blocked by a negative keyword and
then you can go in there look into your account whether it is set up at ad group level, campaign
level or an account level negative list and unblock that keyword so it can start running.
But obviously, this will not affect the whole account or the whole campaign it will just
affect that particular keyword but if that keyword was giving you 80% of your traffic
then all of a sudden overnight your impressions, clicks, conversions have all dropped down
and you'll be wondering what the hell is happening.
And then the last one is if your ads have been paused by mistake sometimes they get
disapproved or removed by somebody.
Disapproval happens when Google Ads will continuously scan your website. Right?
So when they're scanning that URL which you put in the ad and if that URL is giving a
404 error at the time of that scan is to disapprove and then you'll think and you will get the
message in there that the destination URL not working you'll go to your website and
you'll think yeah everything is working fine but it's at the point when it is and they
keep checking that URL continuously because they want to give a good user experience to
anyone clicking on an ad from Google because they are referring traffic to your website
right or your landing page they don't want to send somebody to a 404-page error.
So this is why it's important that you're good hosting and that your landing pages don't
go down very often.
Okay, so these are my top tips as to why your ads don't show or don't run.