Google recently has launched a very aggressive campagin to encourage local businesses to setup their own Google Pay Per Click campaign. The offer of  free support and $100 coupons is quite compelling and many businesses have setup their own accounts. However, managing the campaign and getting the best bang for  your buck can be tricky.

One common question people ask is “Why isn’t my ad running”. After spending time setting up your account it’s frustrating to wait a week and see no zero impressions, zero clicks and zero spend. Below are 5 possible reasons, to explain the lack of activity.

1: Is your campaign or ad group active. Many people pause the the campaign or ad group while they are setting up and then later forget to activate.

2: Is your billing information correct. I check all my accounts on a regular basis, it’s not uncommon to see a great campaign that is stop running because the credit card payment was declined.

3: Your keyword bids are set higher than your daily budget itself. Example if your keyword bid is $10 and your daily budget is $5, Google will not show your ads. To correct, just lower your keywords bids and/or increase your campaign daily budget.

4: Low Search Volume for your keywords. Google will not display ads for keywords if there’s low search volume for them.

5: Are are ads “approved” ? Have you broken any ad words ad text policy guidelines, example, excessive capitalization etc. Normally you will receive an automated warning. However, you can double check in the ad words interface by going to ‘Reporting and Tools’ >> ‘More Tools’ >> ‘Disapproved Ads’.

Hope this helps. In later post we will discuss “conversion tracking” a great way to determine if your ads are really working.