A few weeks back one of my clients performed a search for one of his keywords and it didn’t come up in Google search. So of course I review the keyword in the AdWords interface by checking on the ad diagnostic tool and saw that the keyword was not showing due to a low keyword bid and that it wasn’t on page 1 of the Google results pages.
I had a few co-workers here in the office search for the same keyword and some found our ad, while others did not.
I asked my Google Reps about this and they mentioned two things of particular interest.
1. Because I was hitting my campaign budget almost daily, our ads were only showing periodically in order to keep our ads displaying for most of the day. This was happening despite the fact that all of my campaign settings are set to ‘accelerate’ which means they will show our ad each time someone searches for a keyword until the budget is depleted.
2. They also said that because my keyword bid put us below page 1, our ads would only show part of that time, whether your hitting your daily budget or not.
The ad is showing. It’s not showing all the time because of the low bid, says my Google rep.
I asked for any documentation on this and she didn’t have anything to give to me to support her comment.
The point of the story: watch out for those keywords that are below page 1 in the Google SERPS. If they’re important keywords that must be shown, maybe think about increasing their bids.
Also, I have had this problem with new clients before, where AdWords says their ads aren’t showing, but their campaign budget is set to $5/day and their keyword bids are at $1 each. Obviously, Google is going to stop showing your ads at some point to be sure you don’t go over your campaign daily budget.
And always remember to check your settings for each campaign and if you want your ad to come up as many times as it can throughout the day, then chance your default settings from ‘standard – show ads evenly over time’ to ‘accelerated – show ads as quickly as possible’. This will help you ads be active anytime anyone does a search on your keyword until you have hit your campaign budget.
