Did you ever find yourself in the situation of looking for your ad and getting completely stressed out because you don’t see it? If you have ever experienced this, do not fear, we have the solution to your problems!
First things first: our first advice is to stop looking for your ad on Google, as this will only make the situation worse. This way you will only accumulate lots of impressions and no click. This way, the AdWords system will understand that your ad is not pertinent as it is accumulating lots of impressions and no one is clicking on it. For this reason, your ad is going to be shown less and less from your computer. In other words, by searching continuously for your ad you are affecting your ad’s position and your account performance in a negative way.We would recommend using the Ad Preview Tool as a first step to take when you suspect that your ad is not being published.Once you have checked it on this tool, our second advice to understand why your ad is not being published is to use another very useful tool that you can find in the ‘Opportunities’ tab or next to each keyword inside your account, the Ads Diagnostic Tool. This tool will allow you to have an immediate answer to which keywords are not triggering your ad and the reasons for it.After having done these two important checks, you are now ready to identify the possible causes and solve the problem. To make things easier for you to remember, we will use one very familiar word to name all the causes: AdWords.A as in Ad Approval: check the ad’s approval status going to the ‘Campaigns’ tab and selecting ‘Ads’ and the ‘Status’ column. In case you see the message ‘Not approved’, check the reason keeping our Adverting Policies in mind.D as in Definition of your campaign’s status: check that your campaigns are not paused or deleted.W as in What is your targeting: check the location and language setting of your campaign. If the physical area (e.g. city or country) set for your ad to appear is not the same one of your IP address, you will not be able to see your ad when you search for it. Similarly, you will not see your ad if the language you have set for your campaign is not the same one as the one you have set your Google search preferences to.O as in Optimize your Quality Score: always check the quality score of your keywords. Sometimes your ad is in fact published, just not in the first page. This is due to a poor quality score that does not allow the ad to beat the competition in the auction. To improve your quality score without needing to increase your daily budget, we advise you to focus on optimizing it.R as in Reaching your daily budget: your ad is published sensibly depending on your daily budget. The publication of your ad can in fact be interrupted if your daily budget finishes. It can happen that your ad is performing very well and is clicked several times causing the suspension of the publication of your ad as your daily budget is reached. To solve this problem you can simply increase your daily budget or optimize your keywords to decrease your CPC.D like Difficulties with payments: check if your payments are going through in case you have a postpay account (the credit limit or expiry date of your registered credit card). You can avoid the suspension of the publication of your ad by adding a back-up credit card. In case you have chosen the prepay payment method for your account, check if you have enough funds in the account.S like Status of your account: if you have created your account recently, most probably your ads will not serve yet, as your account will be under review for security reasons. All newly created accounts are revised by our experts and in the few days after the account creation there can be delays in your ads’ publication or your ads will not serve at all.
Posted by Helena Rosado, Veronica Diquattro and Tarek Yafi
The Google AdWords Team
