If digital advertising is a part of your marketing strategy, then there’s a high chance you’re running campaigns on Google Ads. The platform vastly enables businesses to establish a strong online presence and target people at different stages of buyer’s journey.
It’s really impressive how Google managed to pack its advertising platform with different ad types and formats, advanced features, and powerful management and performance analysis tools. Google Ads is like a giant, well-oiled machine with many different parts and systems, all designed to get it working and connect brands with customers.
But just like any other machine, sometimes errors happen. A somehow common problem advertisers could face when running campaigns on Google is their ads not showing. This means that they follow the standard procedure to create campaigns, but somehow their ads won’t show up when they’re supposed to. If you run Google Ads campaigns and wonder why my Google ads are not showing, keep on reading. We’re going to dive into this problem and give you some well-proven solutions to hopefully help you overcome these issues and stop you budget from going to waste.
Does your ad even exist?
We’re not trying to be cheeky. Despite what you might think, there’s a chance your ads don’t even exist to be displayed. Ads could have been removed from your account for one reason or another, so make sure to check you campaigns to see of they’re still there.
If you wish to check whether you’ve accidentally deleted them yourselves or not, you can check the change history section in your Google Ads. If your ads have been deleted, you have to start over and create them again.
Your campaign is paused
Beside yourself, Google can also pause your campaigns, resulting in your ads not showing. This could happen due to terrible performance or running out of time or budget. Either way, check your campaign’s status and make sure its active.
Keyword volume is too low
In Google search ads, you bid on keywords relevant to your business and what you offer. If the keywords you’ve targeted with your ads don’t get looked up enough by people, Google will stop showing your ads. Extremely low search volume could happen to very specific keywords or long-tail keywords.
Check the keywords status column in the keyword section of your Google Ads account. Google will tell you if the keywords you’ve picked aren’t getting enough traffic. If that’s the case, try broader keywords.
Money’s the issue
Similar to almost every other major self-serve advertising platform, Google Ads works with an auction system and daily budgets. Your campaigns have an average daily spending limit, and if that limit is exceeded, or if there’s an issue with your payment method so that Google won’t be able to charge you, your ads will not be displayed to your audience.
Don’t set your CPC bids too high or too low because you’ll either drain your budget or lose in every auction, both resulting in your ads not showing.
Your audience is too narrow
The size of the specific audience groups you’ve define for your Google Ads campaigns could be the reason they’re not being displayed to users. You can set many different filters for your target audience like location, gender, interests, etc.
If these filters have shrunk your audience to the point that there are less than 1000 active users for search campaigns or 100 active users for display campaigns in them, Google will stop serving your ads. There’s also the case when you have a large enough audience, but they’re not generating enough traffic for your selected keywords. Audience and competitive research and proper scheduling is recommended to get rid of this problem.
Your landing page is terrible
Your bid is not the one and only deciding factor in Google Ads auctions. Google also cares a lot about what happens after users click on your ads. Without a proper landing page with good design and relevant content, your ad’s ranking will be low and you’ll have no chance in auctions. Make sure to create highly focused, beautiful post-click landing pages for your ads that tell your audience exactly what they should do next.
Google is at your doorstep with a search warrant
The Internet giant has a habit of randomly putting your account under review for reasons such as verifying billing information, security, checking if your ads meet their “quality standards”. During this period, which could last up to three business days, all your campaigns will be paused and your ads will now be shown to anyone across Google services. Don’t worry though. Once the process is finished, your campaigns will reactivate and there’s no need to enable them again manually.
Final thoughts
Google Ads is a very effective marketing tool and it’s perfect for businesses of all sizes to reach more people and find new customers. It’s feature-rich, it’s easy to work with, and it’s cost-effective, but it’s not flawless. Every now and then, you might encounter some issues that result in your ads not showing. Hopefully, the solutions we just gave will you help your overcome these issues and get your campaigns up and running.
