This is one of the most common questions I hear from clients involved in paid search. There are a few reasons as to why the ads don’t show up but if your keywords are in your campaign and everthing it setup properly, then it could just be a matter of coverage.

Sometimes you might find that the ads don’t display usually because your budget isn’t high enough to get full search coverage.

For example

• Your ads are scheduled to display from 6am – 12 midnight, 7 days per week.
• Your budget is set at $20 per day

Scenario

Your ads are clicked a number of times from 6am – 12 midday and half of your budget is now used up so you only have $10 left of your daily budget. Your campaign still needs to run for 12 more hours so your ads will display intermittently throughout the rest of the day to give you the greatest coverage for the remainder of your scheduled ad time.

I’m assuming that Google does this so that you get an even level of enquiries throughout the day instead of lots of enquires all at once plus to minimise the same people looking for services from clicking your ads multiple times.

As Google provides more information to Adwords users in their account interface, it is increasingly more obvious that PPC alone is not enough to provide low cost per click. With more information added on keyword quality score, it is now more than ever necessary to start implementing effective SEO techiniques on your sites pages particulary if you are targeting those pages within your Adwords campaign. So that means spending more money on getting an SEO consultant which you may think isn’t viable, however how much more are you paying per click for a poorly optimised Adwords campaign.

Dave Davis of Red Fly Marketing wrote an excellent article on how they improved a clients Adwords quality score in their campaign using both on and off page techniques and pretty much shows that it was essential that their client has SEO done on their landing pages at a minimum.

Time and time again I see Adwords accounts wasting money paying far higher bids than they need to simply because they lack the understanding of how Google Adwords ties into their web sites on page information.

Many Adwords users simply get into the Adwords keyword tool and start adding all sorts of related keywords to their campaign trying to drive traffic and conversions to their site often overlooking the fact that in many cases their web site doesn’t support their keyword list.

Google is predominatly about relevancy and just adding keywords to your Adwords campaign is only part of creating an effective campaign.  Create adgroups that target similar keywords and then push those targeted keywords to most relevant page on your site.  If your landing pages don’t contain information related to keywords in your adgroup keyword list then you can bet that your keywords will become inactive or you’ll have to bid alot more to target those keywords.

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