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Agency Guides, Digital Advertising Why Your Google Ads Aren’t Showing, and How to Troubleshoot

It’s incredibly frustrating to have spent a bunch of time setting up a new campaign in Google Ads simply to have it not run. It’s enabled, it has a budget, it has ads and keywords, but… nothing.

Here are the most common issues (and some of the not-so-common ones) why your ads haven’t started running yet:

• The campaign is too new.
  • Give any new campaign at least 48 hours to get going.
• Your bid strategy is too ambitious.
  • This typically occurs if you start a new campaign with a bid strategy of ‘Maximize Conversions’ or ‘Maximize Conversion Value’. If that’s the case, change it to ‘Maximize Clicks’ to get it going, and then change it back after you’ve generated some click activity.
• Your bid strategy is wonky.
  • If you have your bid strategy set to ‘Manual CPC’ with a bid cap of $0.01, then you’ll never win any auctions, and your ads will never appear. Consider a bid strategy like ‘Maximize Clicks’ to get your campaign going.
• Low budget.
  • If your budget is very low, especially when your industry is highly competitive, you may not be able to win any auctions and your ads won’t show. Consider raising your daily budget, even temporarily, to get the campaign going.
• Audience targeting set to ‘Targeting’ and not ‘Observation’.
  • In a search campaign your audience targeting is typically set to ‘Observation’. This will tell you which of these audiences are providing results for your campaign. But if you have it set to ‘Targeting’, then Google will only show your ads to people within one or more of those audiences, which could be too restrictive.
    
• Keywords don’t get enough search volume.
  • If you’re targeting very obscure keywords that don’t get much search volume, then your ads don’t have any searches to appear next to. This can be fixed by using broader/long tail keywords, and using ‘broad match’ (where appropriate).
• Policy violations.
  • Google Ads should notify you of any policy violations in the topmost banner of the site. These could be restricting your ads or preventing them from showing altogether.
• Restrictive location.
  • If you’re targeting a very small geography, you may not have a large enough audience to produce any relevant searches.
• Conflicting negative keywords.
  • Sometimes your negative keywords conflict with your targeted keywords. This would prevent your ads from showing. E.g. You’re targeting the keyword “red running shoes”, but you have “shoes” as a negative keyword.
• Headsmack issues.
  • These are the embarassing ones. Is your campaign enabled? Do you have ads in place? Have you picked some keywords to target?

If all else fails? Hire an expert. Plenty of people will offer an audit of your campaign. We audit Google Ads accounts for as little as $500. Happy to help.