If you’re not seeing your ads in the Ad Preview tool, it could be due to the following reasons:
- Your payment didn’t go through.
If you’re paying for your Google Ads account via automatic payments, Google will charge you when (1) you reach your pre-set payment threshold or (2) you reach the end of your current billing period. It depends on which happens first.
Ensure that the payment information linked to your account is valid and up-to-date for the transactions to go smoothly. If Google can’t charge you, your ads won’t show up in the search results.
- Your bids are either too high or too low.
You have to set a daily budget for each of your Google Ads campaigns. If the maximum cost per click (CPC) bid you set for a particular keyword exceeds the budget of the campaign it lives within, your ads won’t show for queries that match that keyword. Make sure your account is free of these conflicts between campaign budgets and keyword bids.
On the other hand, your ads may not be showing because the bid is too low. Your ad rank for a given auction depends on your quality score for the keyword you’re bidding on as well as the bid itself. If you navigate to the Keywords section of your Google Ads account, you can use bid simulators to estimate the impact of increasing your bids by different amounts.
- Keyword search volume is too low.
If a keyword you’re targeting drives little to no search traffic on a monthly basis, the ads you have tied to that keyword may be ineligible to show. Once Google notices that you’re targeting an extremely low-volume keyword, it’ll make it temporarily inactive within your account. If search volume picks up to a reasonable level, Google will automatically reactivate the keyword.
- Your ad has been paused, removed, or disapproved.
It’s possible that your Google ads aren’t showing simply because they’ve been paused or because the ad groups or campaigns that house them have been paused. If this is the case, all you need to do is switch them from Paused to Enabled.
Alternatively, your ads may not be showing because they or their corresponding ad groups or campaigns have been removed from your account. When this happens, you’ll have to start from scratch.
To see if you’ve accidentally paused or removed anything within your account, simply navigate to Change History and you should see the changes that have been made to your account.
If nothing has been paused or removed but you’re still not seeing your Google ads show up in the search results, it is possible that they have been disapproved. Check out Google’s ad policies to learn how you can fix your disapproved ads and get them back on the SERPs.
- Scheduling or targeting mistakes.
Set an advertising schedule for each campaign to tell Google which days of the week and hours of the day you’d like your ads to show. Navigate to the Ad Schedule tab of the campaign you’re concerned about and make sure your ads aren’t scheduled too narrowly.
Next to that Ad Schedule tab you’ll also find the location targeting parameters for your campaign. It’s possible that your Google ads aren’t showing simply because there’s not enough keyword search traffic coming from the geographic region you’re targeting.
Pro tip: If you want to see how a particular segment of your prospects respond to your ads without exclusively advertising to that segment, you can use the Observation setting rather than the Targeting setting. Whereas targeting limits you to reaching only a specific audience, observing enables you to reach a wide audience while tracking the performance of your ads among a specific audience. That way, you’re gleaning valuable insights without going too narrow.
- Negative keywords are negating active keywords.
If some of your Google ads aren’t showing, it may be because you have negative keywords canceling out active keywords.
- Your negative bid adjustments are too large.
The negative bid adjustments you’ve set are so large that they’re tanking your ad rank. Once again, using the simulated bid columns within your Keywords report will prove helpful.
- Your ad group isn’t focused.
Each ad group within your Google Ads account is consist of two components: keywords and ads. The keywords and ads that belong to the same ad group are tied together. When one of your keywords is triggered by a user’s search query and you’re entered into the ad auction, Google selects one of the ads that you’ve tied to that keyword.
Your performance in the ad auction depends on how relevant your ad is to the user’s query. The more relevant your ad, the higher you’ll rank in the paid search results. By building ad groups that are composed of closely related keywords. If the keywords within your ad group are closely related to one another, it’s practically guaranteed that your ad will be relevant to the user’s query—no matter which keyword is triggered or which ad is selected.
The fact that your Google ads aren’t showing may be due to the structure of your ad groups. If you find that you’ve built your ad groups with keywords that aren’t closely related to one another, that’s likely the reason you’re not performing as well as you’d like to in the ad auction.
- Your ad copy isn’t optimized.
Your ads may not be showing simply because your copy isn’t keyword-focused enough.
Optimizing an ad to rank highly in the paid search results means incorporating your target keyword into your copy. By writing a copy that includes your target keyword, you’re effectively signaling to Google that your ad is relevant to the user’s search query.
Within a given ad group, you should have more keywords than ads. If you’ve ensured that these keywords are closely related to one another, it’ll be infinitely easier to incorporate them into your copy.
- Your landing page isn’t relevant.
When judging whether you deserve to rank highly in the paid search results, Google doesn’t simply look at the relevance of your ad copy but it also takes into consideration the relevance of your landing page.
Look closely at each of the keywords you’re targeting with your Google ads. Think about the users whose queries are triggering these keywords. What are they struggling with? What can you do to help them out?
Your answers to these questions should inform the content on your landing pages. The better you are at solving users’ problems with your landing pages, the better you’ll perform in the Google Ads auction. You should also make sure to incorporate your target keywords in your landing page copy.
- Your click-through rate (CTR) is too low.
If your ads aren’t showing and you can attribute it to low CTRs, review your ad copy and determine whether you’re doing a good enough job of mapping keywords to the customer journey and addressing users’ needs.
From a practical standpoint, the CTR of your ad indicates how appealing it is to your prospects. If your ad’s CTR is high, that means your messaging is resonating with users really well. If it’s low, then you're not speaking their language persuasively enough to convince them to click.
Google rewards advertisers who write ads that resonate with users. Therefore, the lower your CTR for a given ad (or keyword), the worse you can expect to perform in the ad auction. You need to write a copy that grabs their attention and compels them to click if you want your ad to be consistently shown to your prospects.
Look at the keyword your ad is targeting, think about the users who are triggering that keyword, and identify the specific problem you need to address. In other words, writing an ad that drives a high CTR is all about meeting the unique needs of your prospects according to their position along the customer journey.