Ad displays - yes no maybe so?

sometimes it shows up, sometimes not

[limitup]

I have an ad along with only 2 or 3 other advertisers, so there is never more than 3-4 adwords displayed for this term. So I'm wondering why MY ad only shows up what seems like half the time? If I do a search for this term it might show up, and it might not. 5 minutes later it will, or maybe not. It seems totally random. I can't think of any reason for this. Any ideas? It's the only ad in the group.

[your_store]

The only thing I can think of is that you don't have the daily budget for the campaign set high enough. If you have the budget set for less than the recommended amount, your ad will not be shown every time someone searches your phrase.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

Good call, your_store. This is almost certainly a daily budget issue.

limitup, you can confirm this by following the 'Edit Campaign Settings' link towards the upper left of the Campaign page.

Click the 'Recommended Budget' link in item number two. If it gives you a number bigger than your actual budget, then your ad won't show all the time.

Handy Tip: If the recommended budget is larger, you can estimate how often you ad is showing by looking at the ratio of your actual budget to the recommended budget. For example: If your actual budget is $10.00 and you Recommended Budget is $15.00, then your ads will be showing 2/3rds of the 24 hour day - or 16 hours out of the 24.

AWA

[limitup]

Actually I used the recommended amount, but thanks for replying. I was actually thinking of trying an even higher amount just for fun. We'll see what happens over the next few hours I guess...

[yowza]

Yes. My campaign's recommended daily amount was not nearly high enough to cover all of the visitors I received. I have had to raise the amount a couple of times. I think that the Google recommendation seems to underestimate.

[limitup]

Well what I mean is, for this particular campaign the daily limit is $50. Today I have received only $21.69 worth of clicks, and now since I originally posted this message, my ads have completely stopped showing at all?

[your_store]

I'm not exactly sure, but I think Google works more on a monthly model. So one day, you might get $20 less than your limit and the next you might go $20 over. In the end, you still average $X a day for the month.

Perhaps AWA can expand on this tomorrow.

[limitup]

I just put the daily limit high in an attempt to make sure that my ads are shown as often as possible.

[eWhisper]

If G says you've shown $21 in traffic, that means to the point that it's been reported. I don't think their reporting is real time, it's a couple hours behind. So you could have received $50 in traffic, but it's not showing up in the account manager yet.

Another thing to consider, the daily budget is based off of the average day. So if on day 1 it would take $75 to get all the traffic, and on day 2, it would take $25, then the average is $50, however, on day 1, you'd only have gotten %66 of the traffic ($50 of $75) as G stops showing your ads when you hit the daily mark.

We generally add 20% to the G recomended budget (and for some small terms upto 500%), to catch all the traffic.