I came across this new tool in my Google AdWords campaign last Friday. When you’re in an AdWords campaign, right next to your ‘opportunities for improvement’ link at the top of the page, there is a link to the right of that which says, ‘Diagnose Keywords – New!’ I asked my AdWords Rep if indeed this tool is new, and she said it is, and it’s gradually rolling out for select advertisers. So, be on the lookout here in the next couple of weeks for the ‘Diagnose keywords – New!’ link.
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Once you click on ‘diagnose keywords’, you are taken to an ‘ad diagnostics tool’ which allows you to find all keywords in your campaign or specific ad group that are not displaying ads and the reason why. Now you no longer have to click on each individual keyword ad diagnostic icon to see if that keyword is displaying ads or not!
Once you select your campaign, ad group or specific keyword, you then have options to further drill down by Google domain, geographic address, language or IP address. So you can target a certain location or language and see if that keyword is displaying or not. Once you choose all of your options and click ‘continue’, the tool will begin scanning all your keywords and breaks them down into categories by reason for not displaying your ads.
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As the tool scans, it eventually gives you the number of keywords that are not displaying ads, the actual keywords that are not showing, and the reason why they’re not showing, according to Google.
The reasons can vary from:
1. A negative keyword is preventing your ad from showing.
2. The keyword phrase you’ve entered has a low search volume and isn’t showing any of your ads.
3. Although you ad is showing, its rank is not high enough to place it on the first page of search results.
4. One of your other ads is showing for this keyword.
5. This keyword isn’t triggering ads to appear on Google or the search network.
6. These keywords are currently paused.
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Then you can click on that specific keyword or ad group and go straight to it in your campaign summary tab to make any necessary changes.
Another cool part of the tool, is that if you do a keyword search in Google for a keyword that should be displaying your ad, and you can’t seem to find your ad for that particular keyword, you can plug in the SERP URL into the ‘option 2’ part of the tool, and it will tell you whether or not your ad is being displayed. If it is, it will give you a preview of that ad that is being displayed for that keyword, and any other ad that may be displaying for that keyword like an image ad or a YouTube ad.
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I like the tool overall and I think it’s a great improvement, but I do wish that Google would set up an alert system to email you when keywords have errors that prevent them from showing your ads. Again, this new feature is gradually rolling out for some advertisers so be on the lookout!
