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Paid Search: Why aren’t my ads appearing?

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The following post is from Carley Beckner, Web Marketing Analyst.

We know if can be infuriating to invest in paid search campaigns and not see your ads appear when you search the terms you bid on. This post, the first in a two part series, will provide potential reasons for why you may not see your ads immediately (or at all) and tips for how you can fix these issues. The second part will discuss why your ad isn’t ranking in the top spot.

Please note, before we dive into the meat of this post, we assume that you have a general understanding of Paid Search. If you have questions about what paid search is, please read Paid Search 101: Why do you need it? or PPC 101 or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Visibility, before continuing.

Why Aren’t Your Ads Appearing

Your ads are not approved. All ads are placed in a brief hold while they are approved by Google. If your ads do not show up after a few hours, there is the possibility that they have been flagged for:

  1. Trademark infringement (This can be corrected by reaching out to your Google representative if it is indeed your trademark)
  2. Inappropriate content (profanity, excessive use of uppercase letters or punctuation, explicit advertising of tobacco products, child pornography, etc.)
  3. Incorrect Display URL (You could have made an error when entering your display URL, so it does not exist or that it does not match your destination domain)
  4. Not Found Destination URL (if your page sends users to a landing page that does not exist, Google will pause ads due to poor user experience)
  5. Malware detection (if Google detects that your site could have been hacked or has malicious spyware on the site, they will pause all of your ads to protect users from potentially receiving a virus)

Your budget is too small. The campaign could have an extremely large amount of searches every day. In this case, you probably will max out your budget before all of those searches have been conducted. Google allows you to spend your budget evenly throughout the day to ensure that searches later in the day will also see your ad. For example, the term “Washington DC hotels” has over 22,000 searches on a monthly basis at an average cost per click of $3.44. With a budget of $100 a day, you can receive about 29 clicks in one day, and that is for only one search term. While it would be ideal to have a presence every time a user searches for your keywords, it is not always possible as the vast amount of searches may limit your proportional visibility.

Your ranking is too low. If your ads do not show up in the top three positions, Google may not show them as the search engine may provide additional information down the side of the Search Engine Results page, such as a map or encyclopedic information. This may push your ad to the second page, or it may not even show at all during that search query.  We will explain how to improve your ad ranking further in part 2 of this series.

Google does not see the result as relevant to you. Every user receives different results as Google provides what they deem the most relevant experience for users. Two individuals could search for the same keywords, but their search engine results pages could look very different due to previous search history, social signals and more.

You may have clicked on the ad too many times. Google takes into account how many times a user clicks on an ad. If they notice that you continue to make the same searches and click on the same ad, they may think that you are a fraudulent user who is trying to cause an advertiser to run out of budget. If they see repeated behavior like this, Google excludes the IP address from seeing the ads and returns the ad spend to the advertiser. This helps to discourage competitors from trying to remove their competition on similar keywords.

Next Steps

If you do not see your ads showing, the best way to determine the issue is to start by analyzing your ads again. If they were disapproved, fix the error and resubmit them. If they are eligible to be shown, use the “Ads Preview and Diagnosis” tool located in Adwords under Tools and Analysis to determine if you have budgetary constraints or if you just search the terms too often. If the issue is a budgetary constraint, it is important to analyze if it is worth increasing ad spend and whether your business can handle the increase in ad spend budget.

MICROS eCommerce specializes in paid search campaigns for the hospitality industry. If you have questions about why your ads aren’t appearing or about paid search in general, contact us.

Interested in ramping up your online strategy? Check out the full suite of MICROS eCommerce interactive marketing toolssend us an email, or give us a call +1 301.841.4700(US) | +44 (0)20 3004 9468(UK).


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