AdWords finally makes it easy to find out why your ads aren't showing

Why are my ads not showing? That was the most common question I heard from advertisers while working at Google, year after year. There are many reasons this might be happening, such as a low budget, Max CPCs lower then the first page bid estimate, regional targeting, and many other potential issues. There isn't always a simple answer to this question and it is highly specific to each account. This is why help articles are not always, well, helpful. Clients have to browse through technical jargon and are still often unable to find out what the issue is. Worse yet, they are not even aware of the available tools that can help them troubleshoot.

AdWords just released a feature that aims to ameliorate this common problem by allowing advertisers to easily diagnose keywords and find out why they might not be triggering ads. Previously, advertisers had to navigate to the tools section in their account, which many never made it to or even knew about.

Now, the tool has been integrated into your campaigns and can be found while looking at data within the Keywords tab in your AdWords account. While on the Keywords tab, click on More Actions and then Diagnose Keywords. The tool will walk you through the rest.

Dedicated customer support isn't a strength for AdWords, especially when it comes to small, lower spend clients. So, I hope advertisers empower themselves and use the various tools AdWords has developed to help them manage and troubleshoot their accounts.