If you search for your own ad time and time again, you may actually be harming your entire campaign. But there are alternatives to checking the visibility of your ads and to analysing the success of your advertising measures.
Your own Google Ad is sometimes not visible
If you have broadcasted an ad with Google Ads or via an agency, you want to ensure at the launch of the campaign that this ad is also visible – for instance by searching with the respective keywords from the viewpoint of an interested user. As a result, advertisers often search for their own ad: out of curiosity if everything is working as desired or out of mistrust of whether the booked agency service is truly worth the money.
Then, in many cases, you experience a rude awakening: your own ad cannot be found despite entering the right keywords. But this does not mean the ad is not broadcast at all. After all, the frequency of the ad and its positioning in the search results list are based on many different factors, and they also depend on the user. The influential factors include:
- The user’s search history
- The budget invested – a low budget often results in a low impression share, i.e. a low number of ad displays
- The maximum bids
- The location – campaigns can be limited to the region
- The time of the search – with Ads Schedules, your ad can be broadcast at certain times
- The end device used – searches via smartphone can, for instance, be excluded
To be able to make a reliable statement about the performance of an ad, a period of at least 14 days is necessary; 30 days is even better. With one or several searches of your own, you cannot identify statistical trends. Information regarding the performance of a campaign is provided in the monthly reports and the data in your Google account.
Why users should not search for their own ad
If you intensively search for your own ad, but you do not click on it – which naturally costs you money – you may be harming your own campaign. This is because when a user enters a keyword but then does not click on the ad displayed, this has a negative effect on the ad’s Quality Score and thus on its position. The click-through rate (CTR) lowers, and Google assumes a low relevance of the ad for the searcher. The cost per click (CPC) may increase, and, in the end, the advertiser must pay more for their campaign.
What’s more, Google blocks ads for IP addresses which continually search for relevant keywords but never click on the ads. Thus, the impression is made that the ads are not even broadcasted – when, in fact, they are simply not displayed for the advertiser.
„What’s more, Google blocks ads for IP addresses which continually search for relevant keywords but never click on the ads. “
Google Ads: monitoring via the Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool
But there are alternative options for checking your own ads, without harming your campaign. Google Ads offers the Preview Tool for previewing and diagnosing ads. It can be found in your Google account under the path “Tools and Settings” > “Planning” > “Ad Preview and Diagnosis ”.
After logging into your Google Ads account and entering the keyword, the device, language and location appear here in the preview of a Google search result list. Based on this, you can check if your own ads can also be displayed. This tool therefore simply simulates the Google search, without the user leaving behind any digital footprints which could have a negative impact on the actual broadcasting of the ads.
Upon clicking on the magnifying glass, a message appears saying whether the ad can be broadcast in general or not. If not, you will be notified of the reasons why.
