“I Can’t Find My Ads on Google”

When investing in AdWords many businesses are keen to see if their ads are working. We set up our campaigns and make them live, suitably chuffed with ourselves. We open Google in another tab, type in a keyword breathe deep and hit enter fully expecting to be top of the page with the ad copy we wrote shining like the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. Instead we see our competitors and we are enraged!

Before losing it, it is important to remember that AdWords is an auction style system that works to an agreed daily budget. We essentially bid on the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) for the position of our ad every single time someone searches for our service. So to be at the top of the page we must out-bid our competitors.

When you first start to use AdWords, it is important to factor in that competitors in your industry have been bidding on the top AdWords positions for some time. Because of this you are going to have to bid a little more initially to gain top ad position. Google will give precedence in most cases to the most relevant ad, all bids being equal (this is a simplification of the Google algorithms). Google measures ad relevancy in a number of ways one of which is via Click-Through-Rate (CTR). A good CTR demonstrates very clearly to Google that your ad is relevant to the search terms targeted.

Basically, Google must calculate how often it can show your ad in relation to how often it is clicked on to exhaust the budget. To simplify, say we had a $10 a day budget, with our average CPC at $1 and we know that we can get 10 clicks before our budget runs out. For the purpose of this example let’s say we have a 10% CTR. If there are 1000 people searching in a day for the keywords our ads trigger for we would need a budget of $100 a day in order to show for every single search, as Google calculates the CTR to be 10%. Considering we only have a budget of $10, Google calculates that it can only show the ad once every ten times someone searches, otherwise we will be clicked out of the budget in the first couple of hours of the day.

How does this relate to your budget and your advert not showing when you search on Google?

As it is still early on in the piece, Google is trying to figure out how often to show your ads so they appear throughout the day to maximize your budget. (Of course there is much more to it than this as Google algorithms are incredibly complex but this is it in the simplest form).

How can you combat this?

1. Increase the budget: This is not recommended early on in the campaign as we do not know what keywords convert the best in order to focus the budget on them. Increasing the budget prior to knowing what is converting could potentially waste a lot of money.

2. Accelerate the Ad Schedule: This would mean that your advert would show every single time someone searches but would also be likely to mean that by early to mid-morning we wouldn’t have any budget left and right now we don’t know what time(s) of the day people are more likely to convert into sales and leads.

3. Reduce the area in which we are showing: Many companies want to be as universal as possible, however with a limited budget we need to look at the areas where we are most likely to convert first. Later on we can send the campaign national or even international.

4. Invest in the AdWords Account: Find out the converting keywords/ ads/ days and times of day that result in enquiry then focus on those which results in sales. I highly recommend this option but it does take time to get it right. In order to make this work we need to find the keywords that result in conversions and then reduce the cost on those keywords/ads.

Going back to relevancy (as this is imperative) don’t search on Google for your adverts. Firstly, if you do see the ad and don’t click on it you are essentially telling Google that your ad is not relevant for that search term which will reduce your Ad Rank and increase your CPC. Secondly, after a while Google will decide that seeing as you haven’t clicked on your advert despite displaying it to you several times they will assume that is not relevant to you personally and stop showing you it.

Instead, make use of the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool in AdWords which will allow you to search for your adverts without affecting the stats. For help using this tool or further advice on setting up a profitable AdWords campaign contact one of the SponsoredLinX experts on 1300 859 600.

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