Why Your Google Ads Campaign Are Not Getting Any Impressions

Is your Google Ad live and active yet for some reason, it’s not getting any impressions and therefore clicks?

In this article, I’m going to discuss the three possible and most likely reasons why your campaign is not getting any impressions. 

As mentioned, we’re going to go through those three possible reasons why your ads are not getting impressions. 

So the first possible reason is that your newly created campaign, your ads are not eligible, they are still going through the approval process, the approval process can really vary depending on your ad account in what industry you’re in.

Typically, ads are approved within a 24-hour period, but in some cases, it may take longer, up to 48 hours. How can you determine if your ads are approved? Let me show you right now. 

So here I am in my live Google Ad Account. And as you can see, here, I’ve gone straight into my search campaign. I’ve got one ad group here. And as you can see here, no impressions and no clicks.

So if I click into that ad group, and I go to ads and assets, we’re going to be looking at this status column here, and so it says that it is actually eligible. 

So this means that my ad is approved, you can see obviously, the green is active here. So that is not the reason why my ads are not getting any impressions. 

Which takes me to the second possible reason why my ads might not be getting impressions. And that might be that my location targeting is too narrow. When creating your campaign, you need to assign a location target indicating the region where you want your ads to be shown. Some people tend to target locations too narrowly.

So, how do you check what your location target is? I’m going to show you right now. Let’s navigate up to the campaign level and then click on ‘Locations’

And then you’ll see here that my location is targeting the entire United States now, most likely, you know, the population size of the United States is huge. 

So this second possible reason is not relevant. In this particular case, location targeting is definitely not too tight. But maybe in your situation you’ve done maybe, you know, radius targeting of a three mile radius, and therefore there’s just no one in that defined area who is searching for what you’re bidding on. 

The third possible reason your ads are not getting impressions is due to your bid strategy. That is how much you are willing to pay for a click. 

Generally speaking, there are two distinct types of bid strategies that you will encounter. The first is manual CPC bidding, where you manually select the upper bid limit that you’re willing to pay for a click.

The other type of bid strategy, which is usually the default when creating a new campaign, is Google’s automated bid strategies. With these, you can instruct Google to either maximize conversions, maximize clicks, or use Target CPA bidding.

And you’re not actually deciding what you’re willing to pay for a click; Google is deciding based on all the data points they have on their users, as well as the data in your Google Ad Account. Now, if you have a new campaign and a brand new ad account, and you’re using automated bid strategies, maybe selecting Target CPA bidding, it doesn’t have enough data to work effectively.

It can struggle to get impressions when you jump straight to automated bid strategies. So that could be a possible reason. Generally speaking, for a new campaign and a new ad account, my preference is to use manual CPC bidding so you can actively participate in the Google ad auction and then gradually transition to automated bid strategies.

In my ad account here, you’ll see in this particular ad group, we are using manual CPC bidding, as indicated by the column here,

I’m going to show you how you can check what bid strategy you’re doing. And then you can see here, bidding, I’m doing manual CPC bidding. 

Now the reason I want to do manual CPC bidding is because I’m bidding on really expensive keywords. 

For context. I am promoting this course that I have, which is how to teach people how to create a retargeting campaign on Google and on Facebook, which only sells for $10.

So if I jump straight to the automated bid strategies I’m going to spend more than $10 on a click, and the course only sells for $10. So I don’t want to do that. Therefore, I’m doing manual CPC bidding. And I’ll slowly be increasing the bids. 

If I go into the ad group, you’ll see here that it is telling me for Google retargeting campaign, the first page bid is $11.35.

So I’m kind of being a bit cheeky, seeing if I can get away with a $3 bid to see if I can get some impression. So I’m going to slowly raise my bids, till I get to enough of a threshold where I will get impressions, even with it below first page bid. 

I could also consider adding different match type keywords, as they might be more cost-effective, such as broad match. However, I’m not quite at that point yet. But the bid strategy is really the main reason why people’s ads are not getting impressions, once the ads are approved and the location targeting is fine.

Lastly, the fourth possible reason, and a bonus one, is that your campaign is limited by budget. This is particularly true for people in high CPC industries, where the cost per click may be, let’s say, $30, but their campaign budget is only set at $10. 

Therefore, Google doesn’t have enough budget to buy traffic, as it’s constrained by the budget. I like to use the analogy that it’s like trying to drive with the handbrake pulled up – old school with the handbrake on – so that doesn’t really work. So there you have it. Those are the possible reasons why your campaign might not be getting impressions.