January 6, 2022

Dipping your toe in the Google Ads water but concerned your ads aren’t appearing when they’re supposed to? You’re not alone. One of the most common questions I’m asked shortly after launching a Google Ads campaign for a client is, “I did a search for one of the keywords we selected in the strategy, but my ad isn’t coming up, what gives?” My initial reaction the first time I was asked this question a few years ago was, “Yeah really, what gives?” but as I became more familiar with how Google Ads worked I started to realized there are actually a few key reasons why your ads may not appear in results.

While there are a few more reasons why your Google Ads may not be appearing when you search your keywords (such as Ad Rank), these are typically the 5 most common:

1. Daily Budget Already Exceeded
2. Competitors Willing to Outbid You
3. Personalized Search Results
4. Targeted Location
5. Network Selection

Wait, What Are Google Ads?

Google Ads are an online advertising platform which help businesses of all sizes appear at or near the top of Google search results. The most popular form of these ads are PPC (pay-per-click) text-based search ads but there are several other types of ads available in the Google Ads network including display ads, video ads, shopping, local and more. For the purposes of this blog, we’re going to focus on the text-based search ads.

Let’s get into it.

Daily Budget Already Exceeded

Your Google Ads budget is determined by how much you’re willing to spend each day on your ads. For example, if you set a budget of $150/month then your daily budget will be $5/day ($150/30 days in the month = $5/day). Of course because some months have 30 days, some 31 and some 28 (or 29) Google sets your $5/day as an approximate budget which means some days it may be $5.23/day and some days it might be $4.77/day.

All that being said, it’s totally possible that you exhaust your budget very early in the day and thus your ads will no longer be available for the rest of that day. Let’s say for example you’re a lawyer and one of the keywords you’re targeting is “criminal lawyer windsor”. Now let’s say it’s 6:05am, someone does a search for that term, clicks your ad and that click cost you $4.96. That would mean that your $5/day budget is exhausted for the day and your ads will no longer be shown until 12:00am the next day.

Competitors Willing to Outbid You

Given the popularity of Google Ads, no matter what business you’re in, chances are there’s going to be someone else targeting the same keywords as you in their Google Ads campaign. Because Google Ads is an auction system, usually the highest bid(s) end up with the best ad placement. There are also other factors which determine where ads appear (quality of ads and expected impact to name a couple) but if your competitors are outbidding you on a particular keyword, it’s possible you may not appear in the results.

Personalized Search Results

A less commonly known reason why your website may not appear in the Google Ads search results is your own personal search habits. As we all know by now, Google knows WAYYY more about us than we’d ever like to think but one thing they especially know about us is our search habits: how we search, what we search and how often we search for something. At the end of the day, Google wants people to click their Google Ads so if they recognize something in your search patterns that says you’re not likely to click on a specific ad result, they likely won’t show it to you.

Here’s an example, you’re a business owner working on search engine optimization for your business and you decide to start each of your mornings by researching where your website appears in search results for your targeted keywords. Because you do this on a daily basis and because you rarely click any search results when doing so, Google decides to no longer display ad results at the top of your searches.

Targeted Location

A bit of a “well, obviously” one here but I’ve had this come up once or twice so I wanted to mention it. If you set the target location of your Google Ads for a specific region or area of the country which you are NOT currently in, your Google Ads will not appear. Again, a bit of an obvious one but I have had clients who question why their Google Ads aren’t appearing when they search and I have to kindly remind them that we decided to target a region outside of their own personal location.

Network Selection

As mentioned earlier, Google has several types of ads to select from when setting up your campaign. One of the options when setting up your ads is to select under which “Network” you’d like your ads to appear. The options include “Search Network” which in a general sense is the search results, and “Display Network” which are typically photo-based ads that appear as banners on websites. If your Google Ads campaign is setup to only appear on the “Display Network” then your ads will not appear when performing a Google search.