Google Ads doesn't show up in the search results

Your Google ad won't appear every time you search for it. Whether your Google AdWords ad appears depends on a number of factors, such as your budget and other advertisers' ads competing to appear for the same search phrases.

The best way to confirm that your ad is showing for customers (even if you can't see it every time) is to look at your AdWords dashboard or just ask 3plains. If you review your dashboard and find that your ad isn’t receiving any clicks or impressions, it could be due to any of the following reasons:

• Ad locations: AdWords ads appear for customers located in the areas where you want to show your ads. If you're located outside your selected location, you won't be able to find your ad by searching for it. Instead, you can use the Ad Preview tool to do searches within the location that you’ve targeted and preview your ad. Find out more about where your ads can appear.
• Paused or deactivated ad: Make sure your ad is active (and not deactivated) so it can run.
• Too many searches: If you repeatedly search for your own business on Google but don't click your ad, you may stop seeing the ad after a while. That's because Google's system recognizes your computer and stops showing ads that it thinks you aren't interested in. The Ad Preview tool can help you view your ads as they appear in Google search results.
• Billing: Click the gear icon in your AdWords Express dashboard and click Billing to check for billing errors that may have caused your ads to stop running. For example, your ad won’t run if you have a declined or expired credit card or if you’ve used all of the funds from your last payment.
• Depleted or limited budget: With AdWords Express, you set an average daily budget for your ad, which we’ll multiply by the number of days in the month to come up with your maximum monthly budget. Your actual spend may vary each day, and there may be days where we’ll allocate less budget. If the budget for your ad has already been met for either the day or the entire month, your ad won't run.
• Ad under review or disapproved: Disapproved ads also won’t run, so check your email for disapproval messages, which may have information about how to resolve issues with your ad. If you don’t see an email, check your spam folder.
• Using Google Ads: If you’re running ads on both Google Ads and AdWords Express, and the ads are matched to the same search phrases, these ads can't run at the same time. This is because we consider both your Google Ads and AdWords Express ads to be from the same account, and we can show only 1 ad from your account for any given search.

Last Updated: 2019-01-10