Whether you’ve just launched your new AdWords account yourself…or you’ve hired an agency like us. You are probably very eager to see new business driven to your website or maybe you’re an agency or just trying AdWords for a friends business. Whatever the situation is, once you’ve set your campaign to go live many people are driven by the same impulse — to Google our own ads.
Many people start to panic, and worry if their ads are showing for keywords. Are they above or below the competition? Analytics…and metrics are fantastic, but they can pale in comparison to the feeling of seeing your ads on the page, proudly positioned within the top 3 or 4 spots, opening the doors to new potential customers you are waiting for.
Why Googing Your Own Ads Doesn’t Work
Where do we start, there are a number of reasons with Googling your own ads. Perhaps the first problem is that just because you can see your ads when you search for them, doesn’t actually tell you the health of your campaign, and can actually harm your campaigns longevity.
Are you even searching the right things? Some ads are targeted towards specific locations by miles, cities, or even demographics chances are you may not simply be one of the targeted few. For example, if your ads are targeted towards mobile users in Mississauga, ON and you decide to check on your ads when you get home in Milton, ON on your home desktop well changes are it is very unlikely to trigger your ad.
Maybe Google doesn’t like you. Google may have simply chosen, to show you a different ad for that particular search.
There are hundreds of competitors on AdWords bidding for the same keywords. If Google estimates that historically you only have enough budget to compete against everyone else than 50% of the searches on that particular keyword that day, it may only show your keywords 50% of the time. If you happen to be in the segment of searches that don’t see it than it will appear to you that the ad isn’t running, even though everything is fine on the back end.
Continuously Googling your own ads may just annoy Google, and ban your IP from showing them to you.
That’s right! Ads are a tailored experience to each user, so Google may not know these ads are yours specifically. However, if the algorithm thinks that you personally aren’t interested in the Ad, or maybe you’ve seen it enough times Google will stop showing them to you entirely.
Googling, your own ads may be wasting your budget.
Even if you decide to just quickly check. Every time someone searches a topic on Google, it holds an ad auction and attempts to show the most profitable and highest quality of ads. The deciding factor of whether or not your ads show up is a matter of how attractive it is to the people searching — how likely are searchers to click on your ad, and how much are you willing to pay? If you have a high quality score compared to your competition, Google will show your ads even if you’re not necessarily bidding as much. Conversely, if you have a low quality score for a keyword you’ll need to make up the difference by increasing your bid per click.
….To conclude, every time you view your ads and don’t click on them, you are essentially decreasing your attractiveness to Google and increasing the cost per click necessary to keep your position.