Searching for Your Own Ads Every Morning

The morning search

Many owners start the day by typing their main keyword into Google to make sure the ad is there. Some do it from home, again from the office, and once more from the truck.

It feels like checking that the lights are on. In fact each search changes the thing being checked.

And one morning the ad is not there. The owner phones whoever runs the account, raises a bid or rewrites the ad, when nothing was wrong at all.

What each search does

• It counts as an impression, exactly like a customer's search.
• It adds no click, so the click-through rate falls.
• It teaches Google that you see the ad and ignore it.
• It shows a page shaped by you: your location and history.
• It costs money whenever you click to check the link.

The second matters more than it seems. Click-through rate is one of the things AdWords uses to judge how relevant an ad is, and in a small account the owner's searches can be a real share of the impressions.

Why the ad disappears for you

Google watches for people who see the same ad repeatedly and never click it, and may stop showing it to them. After enough mornings, that person is you.

The budget may have run out. A daily budget spent by mid-afternoon means the ad is missing for the rest of the day, for everyone.

The ad may be scheduled to start at eight, and you searched at half past six. Or the campaign targets the towns you serve, and your house sits outside them.

Some accounts also exclude the office's own internet address, so staff never see or click the ads. Search from the office and the ad is missing by design.

Your results are not your customers'

Google shapes results around the person searching: where they are, what device they use and, if they are signed in, what they have searched for before.

An owner searching from home sees the results for the owner's neighbourhood. A customer twenty kilometres away, on a phone, sees a different page with different competitors on it.

So even a search that does show the ad answers the wrong question. It tells you what appears for you, not for the people you are paying to reach.

The Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool

AdWords has a tool for exactly this, under the Tools menu. Type a keyword, choose a location, a language and a type of device, and it shows the results page a searcher there would see.

The preview does not count as an impression, so it changes nothing in the account, however often you use it.

If the ad does not appear, the diagnosis says why: a bid too low for that search, a budget already spent, a schedule, or targeting that leaves that place out.

A worked example

A rural internet installer puts up satellite dishes and fixed wireless antennas for homes and farms across a valley, working from a base in one small town. Its AdWords campaign covers a dozen towns.

The owner searched for rural internet from his kitchen most mornings, sometimes several times, and now and then clicked the ad to check it still worked.

After a few weeks the ad stopped appearing for him. He raised his bids twice, and the budget began running out earlier each day.

The person managing the account opened the preview tool one morning, set to three towns at different ends of the valley, and the ad appeared in all three.

The account's own figures showed what had really changed: since the higher bids, the budget was gone by lunchtime.

The bids came back down so the budget lasted the day. He now checks the preview for three towns on Monday mornings, and gets a short weekly report on impression share.

Better questions than is my ad there

Whether one search shows the ad is not the useful question. How often the ad appears, out of all the searches it could have appeared for, is.

AdWords reports that as impression share, alongside the share lost to budget and the share lost to rank. Those three figures answer the morning question for every search, not just yours.

The search terms report shows what people actually typed before clicking, and average position shows roughly where the ad sat. Looking weekly is usually enough.

Clicking your own ad

Clicking your own ad to check the link costs the same as a customer's click, every time.

It also muddles the figures: a visit with no enquiry, counted against the ad, on a day you may later study to understand why enquiries were low.

To check where an ad leads, copy its final URL from the account and open it in a browser.

Staff and family search too

Owners are rarely the only ones. Partners, staff and relatives check the ad out of interest, and some click it as a favour.

Tell them, kindly, that the most helpful thing they can do is not search for it, and never click it.

If someone genuinely needs to see the ads, show them the preview tool, or send them a screenshot from it.

The counter-case

An occasional search does little harm, especially in a large account with plenty of impressions, where one person's searches are a drop in the total.

Seeing the real results page now and then also has value, to judge the competitors' ads in context and how yours sits beside them. The preview tool shows that too.

The habit is the problem: daily searches in a small account, followed by changes made because of what one search showed. Use the preview tool and the account's own figures instead.

Instead of searching

1. Stop the daily search, at home and at work.
2. Never click your own ad.
3. Open the preview tool under Tools.
4. Check towns you serve besides your own.
5. Read impression share and what it lost.
6. Ask for a weekly report with those figures.
7. Tell staff and family the same.

Step five is the one that replaces the habit. A single search shows whether the ad appeared once, for you; impression share shows how often it appeared for everyone the campaign is meant to reach.

Where each ad points since last Wednesday's deadline is covered in AdWords upgraded URLs before Wednesday.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.