It's a common fear for Adwords customers - they type the major keyword they've been investing time and money into Google yet discover their PPC isn't showing. What is it you're paying for? What is your PPC agency doing? Are you investing money on the wrong keywords?
The answer – to the latter question at least – is no. It is very important to remember that although it is paid search, a lot of the “under the bonnet” details of Adwords are not entirely dissimilar to Google’s organic search algorithm – and that includes personalised search.
Personalised PPC Ads
Much in the same way as Google’s personalised organic search, Google Ads is smart enough to look into your local browser history and tailors your ads to show you ads with maximum relevance. So if it has shown you a certain ad in the past and you didn’t click on it, Google is less likely to re-display similar ads.
Through repeatedly typing the same keyword or phrase with the hope of seeing your adverts, sooner or later your ads will stop showing – because you’re not clicking, Adwords assumes you are not interested in those ads and so removes them from your view.
PPC Budget Allocation
Your PPC budget also determines how often your ads will show up as a percentage of “impressions.” An impression is a “view” of your ad – so when it shows up in a search result and can be seen by someone. For keywords which have very high search volumes, this is the most common cause of PPC panic when ads don’t show up.
Goolge Ads spread your daily budget out over the day to ensure that your ads only show on a limited percentage of possible impressions – this prevents your budget from being spent in the first twenty minutes and then your ads not showing at all for the rest of the day.
This is perfectly normal and actually a good sign that your PPC is being properly managed to let your ads show up for a sensible percentage of available searches. After all, 10% of 100,000 daily searches still lets people see your ads 10,000 times in a day - which is particularly relevant for often very product-specific eCommerce PPC.
Remember that the only way to ensure your ads will show up 100% of the time, is to have an entirely unlimited daily budget – and even the biggest Adwords advertisers would struggle with such an idea. Especially as having a sufficient click budget to achieve this is likely to tank the ROI figures on your PPC and make it an extremely inefficient form of marketing.
Don’t forget as well that despite Google Ads' best efforts, any account with a fixed daily budget could just have run out of clicks for the day – if you’re averaging a cost per click of £2 on a £100 daily budget, that only requires 50 clicks in a day for the budget to be exhausted and the ads to stop showing altogether until the following day!
If you want to know more about how visible your PPC is on searches and how often your ads are showing, ask your PPC agency to send you an impressions share report which will tell you more about how often your ads are visible to people using Google and how much you are potentially missing out on due to your current budget.
Remember that plugging more money in to try to capture more and more search impressions is rarely the most economical way to improve your revenue or lead generation, and getting too overenthusiastic can actually severely damage the viability of your PPC in the medium to long term!
Get in touch with ExtraDigital today and discover how our wealth of experience can help drive your PPC performance.
