In recent years, cross-border merchants can clearly feel that the network environment is becoming more and more complex when expanding overseas markets, and ad blocking tools are emerging in an endless stream. This is indeed a big challenge for merchants who rely on advertising to promote overseas business.
Although Google is still firmly on the throne of one of the world’s largest and most effective display advertising networks, many advertisers have reported that they often encounter such a situation after advertising: the ads are released for a few days, and the display volume is very small, and sometimes there is no display at all.
For this reason, I have summarized 12 common reasons for low or no display of Google ads. You can use this list as a troubleshooting guide, check them one by one, and you may find the crux of the problem and solve it effectively.
PART.01
What is Google ads approved but no display?
If you have just started running your search campaign recently, you may need to wait a while before you can see the number of displays. Here are a few reasons:
Source: Internet
Newly created or modified ads need to be reviewed, which generally takes 24 to 48 hours to ensure that they are all in compliance with regulations.
If your campaign uses automatic bidding, Google Ads will optimize based on your goals, and the results and costs may fluctuate.
If the campaign settings are changed, Google Ads will also need to spend time to readjust the delivery of the ads.
You can try the ad preview and diagnostic tools, which can help you find out why some search terms are not displayed. However, please note that the results of these tools may change over time.
Why are Google ads approved but not delivered?
To answer the question “Why are my Google ads so few displayed?”, our media housekeeper team has summarized the 12 most common reasons when helping more than 1,000 customers to deliver ads. Let’s take a look!
- Billing issues
If you use the monthly billing method, then calculate the account budget. When the campaign costs reach the budget cap before the preset end date, all ads in the account will be suspended. At this time, you need to create or adjust the account budget.
Check the “Billing Overview” or “Transaction History” page to see if there are any unapproved payments. If there is an outstanding balance, your account may be suspended until your payment is cleared.
- Campaign date range
If you select a specific date range, Google Ads will only provide performance data for the selected period, and impressions outside the time range will not be counted.
Source: Internet
Solution:
Log in to your Google Ads account.
Go to the “Campaign” tab.
Click the date range drop-down menu above the statistics table.
Select the “Custom” option.
In the calendar window that pops up, set the start and end dates of the activity.
Click “Apply” to confirm the date range.
- Low bid target and optimization target
If the ad bid is low, the campaign will not be easy to win in the auction, and the number of impressions will be less. When using smart bidding, if you only focus on conversion cost or return rate to set goals and ignore historical data, the strategy may be less effective and even affect the normal delivery of the campaign.
Image source: Internet
The Media Manager Agency Team can provide excellent Google advertising services and help you optimize your bids. If you encounter any problems in this regard, you can directly scan the code to contact Google Ads experts.
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To solve this problem, you can:
Make sure your campaign optimization strategy is consistent with the established goals
Refer to historical data to evaluate the feasibility of manual or automatic bidding goals. For smart bidding strategies, you can consider moderately raising the cost per conversion or return on advertising expenditure targets to increase the number of impressions.
- The budget cap has been reached
The common “culprit” for a sharp drop in impressions is that the budget cap has been reached. The problem is that the monthly budget may “bottom out” in advance. After setting a monthly budget, Google will try to balance daily spending, but sometimes it will reach or exceed the cap before the end of the month, which is common at the end of the month.
Furthermore, if you adjust the budget cap of your account in the middle of the month and set a limit on advertising spending, the ads may also be “offline” in advance. Google will adjust according to the new budget cap to ensure that it does not overspend.
Image source: Internet
It is difficult to clearly define the specific scope of these factors because Google Ads is algorithm-based and automatically managed, so performance and budget spending fluctuate every day and are affected by many other factors. However, the budget is almost always the first place you need to focus on. - The target is too narrow
Targeting settings can effectively help you target specific people who are interested in your business. But be aware that every time you increase targeting conditions or encounter problems with remarketing lists, the potential reach of your ads may be further reduced.
To solve this problem, you can:
Keywords: Search campaigns are not performing well, usually because the keyword targeting is too narrow and the search volume is low. To optimize, you can improve the delivery efficiency by adding negative keywords, analyzing search term reports in depth, and using keyword matching types.
Audience targeting: If the number of users in the audience list is lower than Google’s requirements, it may cause the campaign to fail to deliver. So make sure your audience size meets the standards for effective targeting.
Location targeting: Targeting specific postal codes, smaller geographic areas, or cities with less population may limit the reach of the campaign or cause it to fail to deliver effectively, so you can expand the scope of the targeted cities to reach more audiences.
If you encounter such a problem, you can use the above strategies in your Google delivery strategy. Of course, if you want to open an account for your Google Ads account for free, click the image link below to register and log in!
- Overlapping positioning
If you have multiple campaigns or ad groups with similar positioning in your Google Ads account, there may be overlapping bidding, causing one of the campaigns to occupy most of the traffic, which may be a potential reason why eligible ads fail to be successfully delivered.
Image source: Internet
In this regard, you should carefully review and adjust the targeting settings of each campaign in a timely manner to ensure that there is not too much overlap between them. By refining the targeting strategy, you can distribute traffic more evenly among different campaigns, thereby improving the overall advertising effect. - Popular interests gradually decline
Sometimes, the decline in the popularity of keywords will lead to a decrease in the number of impressions. This situation is not common when targeting broad match or classic keywords, but if your ads follow a popular trend, your display volume may also shrink when the trend changes.
Image source: Internet
Take the Super Bowl as an example. Thousands of companies spent a lot of money on advertising during that period, but once the game was over, about a week later, the search popularity dropped sharply. If you look at the search trend charts of the past few years, you can see that except for the short period before and after the game, the attention at other times is simply not worth mentioning. - Conversion tracking
If your campaign has automatic bidding enabled to optimize conversions, but the delivery is limited, it is likely because there is not enough conversion data or there is a problem with the conversion tracking settings.
Image source: Internet
To solve this problem, you can:
Use the conversion tracking status diagnostic tool to check and confirm that the conversion tracking settings are accurate.
Review and evaluate the history of the target conversion actions to ensure that they occur frequently enough to support the effective operation of automatic bidding.
- Ad quality
Ad quality is about how users feel when they browse your search ads. High-quality ads will naturally perform better, not only ranking higher, but also saving you a lot of money. Different types of ads may also have different standards for judging quality.
Image source: Internet
For example, we can measure the quality of adaptive search ads through the ad strength index. To ensure that the quality of ads is up to standard, Google has set ad ranking and quality thresholds.
To improve ad performance, you can:
Look at your quality score at the keyword level. If the score is high, it means that your ads and landing pages are more relevant and attractive to users searching for that keyword than those of other advertisers.
Check it out and work hard to improve your quality score, so that the overall quality and performance of your Google Ads ads will be improved.
Extended reading: “Poor Google Ad Performance? It may be the quality score! 7 key improvement strategies~”
- Bidding dynamics
Whether other advertisers participate in the bidding for your campaign may have an impact on your ad delivery. Once a new advertiser joins the bidding, your ad impressions may be affected.
To deal with this situation, you can:
You can use the “Auction Insights” report to compare the performance of your campaign with other campaigns participating in the bidding. This report provides valuable reference information to help you reasonably determine bids and advertising budgets. By deeply analyzing the “Auction Insights” report, you can optimize the performance of your campaigns to stay competitive in the auction.
- Your ads are paused
Have you accidentally clicked the pause button or accidentally hit the hotkey in the ads manager to put your campaign into a paused state?
It is worth noting that once an ad is paused, its status will immediately be displayed as “Paused”. In contrast, ads that are canceled, removed or disapproved will have corresponding status information, which will reveal the specific reasons for the current status of the ad in detail.
Source: Internet
It is particularly important to emphasize that only the following situations will cause the ad to not be displayed and the specific status will not be displayed: the budget is too low, the quality score is not up to standard, the bid is too low, or the keyword search volume is very low. In addition, any problem that prevents the ad from being displayed will be clearly prompted by the system so that you can quickly locate and solve it. - Google reviewed and rejected the keyword
When you submit your ad to Google Ads, they will review it immediately and then let you know whether the ad has passed the review. If the ad passes the review, you may think that it can start running immediately, but in fact the situation is more complicated.
Google regularly reviews ads in its ad system to catch non-compliant content that may have been missed during automated review. For example, some advertisers may try to sneak in inappropriate keywords, and this review mechanism is designed to block these non-compliant ads or keywords.
In addition, Google’s policies are not static, and your ads may have been compliant at first, but then become non-compliant due to policy changes; even if these ads have performed well in the past, they may be blocked for this reason.