If you’re a business owner who’s shelling out a large chunk of your advertising budget on Google AdWords, you’d like to see your ads when you search for them, right? But if you’re an AdWords manager, you’ve likely had to explain to your clients why they won’t always see their ads. Of course, there may be fundamental reasons why certain AdWords ads aren’t running, such as disapproved ads or low quality scores, but this may not always be the case.
In most cases, when your client searches for their ads by entering in a keyword in Google, these won’t be the reasons why they don’t see their ads. Below are a few reasons why your client may not always see their ads:
- Client May Be Searching From a City or Town Not Geographically Targeted: For retail and locally-based clients, location targeting is an essential step when setting up an AdWords campaign. For example, if your client owns a landscaping company in northern Westchester County, NY, it’s important to only include cities and towns your client is willing to travel to. If your client is searching for their ads, but they just landed at JFK airport, their ads should not be appearing there. You may have even included certain boroughs of New York in your ‘excluded cities’, seeing as the large volume of searches coming from a major metropolitan city would quickly deplete your budget.
- Budget May Be Limited or Depleted: When a campaign begins nearing its daily budget, the ad won’t appear as frequently, as it will favor keywords with the highest quality scores. If the campaign’s budget has already reached is daily limit, AdWords allows a little bit of flexibility where campaigns can exceed their budget, but it does so sparingly.
- Your Client’s IP Address Could Be Blocked: Let’s face it, your client’s search habits on Google may be overall detrimental to your campaign. The more they’re searching for your ads and not clicking on them, the lower your quality score will be due to the lower click-through-rate. On the contrary, your client may be actually clicking on their ads, which would then cost them money and end up lowering their campaign’s efficacy in the form of its conversion rate. Therefore, you may decide to exclude your client’s IP address. While this isn’t a recommended step, it may be wise to exclude your client’s competitors’ IP address. This is because they may be deliberately clicking on your client’s ad with the intention of depleting their budget for their own business’ benefit.
- Your Client’s Searching from a Desktop and You Put Heavy Bid Adjustments on Mobile: Depending on the industry, AdWords managers may notice that some campaigns have higher conversion rates on certain devices than others. To capitalize on this, it’s wise to put a bid adjustment on whatever device performs best. So if your client’s auto repair business’ campaign has a 75% bid adjustment on mobile, and your client’s searching from desktop, then your client has a good chance of not seeing their ad.
Try to explain to your client how AdWords does everything in its power to provide its customers with the best advertising tools it can. This will mean your client’s ads won’t always appear when they search for them, and in some cases, this may be a good thing.