Why You Don't See Your Search Ad, and How That May Be a Good Thing

One of the most common questions anyone who runs Search campaigns (such as those on Google Ads) will receive is:

“Why didn’t we see our ad when we searched for our name/product/service?”

It’s a fair question, and usually there is a simple explanation involving many possible reasons, but we usually detect a hint of suspicion in its tone. With traditional media, if you paid for a billboard or a newspaper ad, you can plainly see it exists and have no reason to wonder if it showed up because it’s right in front of you.

Digital media is different. The main advantage of advertising online is that you can be selective with your targeting and budget, meaning your ads show in specific contexts, not to everyone at all times. The industry adage has long been “right message, right person, right time”.

However, this can mean that hunting for an ad in the wild may frustrate those who expect things to be in the predicted spot.

You’re targeting a keyword, you enter a search for that keyword, but you don’t see your ad. The kneejerk reaction is to think something must be wrong, but what if there is logic behind it, not only from a technical perspective, but why it’s actually strategic and good for your campaign’s performance?

Let’s talk about some common reasons why you didn’t see your Search ad. Here are ten:

• The campaign ran out of budget for the day. This does not always mean you should increase your budget; you might just be searching late in the day and the daily budget was reached, or it was a particularly active day for the given keywords.
  

• You might be searching for something which you are not currently advertising. For example: if a car dealership has Search campaigns for the brands carried and inventory, but didn’t assign any budget for the service department, “oil changes” may not be among the targeted keywords.
  

• Your IP address is being excluded from the campaign. This is done to avoid spending money on people at your place of work, such as staff searching for their own website. If someone is in your building, chances are they know about you already, so it’s better to spend money on new customers.
  

• We are excluding or lowering our bids on recent site visitors. Similar to the above, it may be a good strategy to not spend on someone who has already been to your site and probably knows how to find you if they look again. This helps spread out your budget by not spending money on the same users repeatedly.
  

• You are searching from a location that is not targeted. Simple answer, but a note on this: geographic targeting isn’t as precise as some think, for privacy reasons, and depending on the cell tower or network you’re connected to, the ad platform might interpret you being in a different location than you really are.
  

• The campaign is set to deliver ads on a schedule. This is typically seen in mature accounts with historical data showing there is a reason to be present in certain days/hours over others, in the interest of spending efficiently. If a schedule is being used and you are searching during an inactive block of time, your ad won’t trigger.
  

• You don’t match the demographic targeting. Same as above, targeting adjustments are often made based on historical data. Some campaigns focus on certain ages/genders because if there is enough search volume, it can make sense to be selective rather than showing to all users.
  

• Your browsing behavior may suggest to the search engine that you are not a prime target. If the algorithm determines that a click or conversion for a given user is unlikely, and we are using a bid strategy that prioritizes higher probability users, it might not bid much on that search.
  

• The search term contains variations of (or extra) words, and the campaign could be focusing on the more precise matches. If certain keyword match types perform better, and the budget is limited, the campaign might be set to target only precise search terms rather than broad matches as well. For example: targeting the keyword “edmonton dentists” might deliver better results than just “dentists”, and so we would be selective and only target the former.
  

• Competitors are bidding more aggressively. We might be targeting the keyword, but there could be more competition in a given moment from other advertisers who don’t care how much it costs. If they are willing to spend like crazy to outrank you at that moment for whatever reason, it’s often better to let them punch themselves out rather than get into a bidding war.

This list is not comprehensive, but you get the picture that there could be many reasons.

So What?

Notice a common theme with this list? The goal is extending your budget instead of burning through it as fast as possible.

Very few businesses will want their ad to show up in every possible scenario, for every user, round the clock, because budget is no concern to them. Your budget is our concern, and we take it very seriously because buying ad space is a numbers game played with live ammo.

Search engine marketing has evolved a lot from its early days of ads in irrelevant multicolor blocks off to the side of the organic results. Ads have become more subtle, and the live auctions that determine what to show the user in milliseconds now factor in more conditions of the search than most people realize.

Some campaign types such as Performance Max don’t have the same level of control as traditional Search campaigns, as the ad platforms gently steer people away from obsessing over the minutia to focus on outcomes. However, there is still valuable data to learn what’s going on with your ads.

Using data to make good decisions hasn’t changed, and it’s central to what we do. From our in-depth reporting dashboards to predictive KPI modelling, we take a long-term and informed approach to your advertising efforts, and are happy to answer your questions along the way!