Does Google not want my money?

[ecommerceprofit]

I have been using Google adwords since they started. I used goto.com even before that. I should know what I am doing. Anyway, I have a semi-new website and tried advertising a year ago and none of my ads would show. I am trying again to just get ad views...not clicks...and I only have 1 impression. Why does Google make it so hard to advertise? I want to give them money but they just don't want to show my ads.

[ecommerceprofit]

I will continue to post here updates to my story. Sort of like a journal... If anyone has ideas that would be great but I'm perfectly capable of figuring this out :-)

My max spending per day is $25.00 while I test just in case Google goes crazy and eats up my account late at night. My max per click cost is 30 cents. I am bidding focusing on impressions and my impression share target is 100%. I tried using the [term] but that did not work so I am broadening to "term" There is no competition for the terms/phrases that I am using.

[ecommerceprofit]

I am only advertising on Google search. No display network partners, etc. Interesting...Google has me as eligible but in "learning" mode...never seen this before

[engine]

Interesting, thanks.

Yes, i've seen that, and one client gave up trying.

BTW, you can edit your posts for a limited period in the Msg# dropdown.

[Mark_A]

Google might not like your targeting impressions because it can't bill you for impressions, only clicks.

[RhinoFish]

For Target Impression Share, it is VERY difficult to attain 100% Imp Share, even for branded traffic, even when there are zero other bidders.

Between Quality Score issues, and Google's Minimum Bid levels, I'd avoid Target Impression Share, it's not your Goal anyhow (I assume you want traffic that buys, so it's either clicks or sales or revenue, not imps).

Try Manual CPC (switch to ECPC once you've got more than 30 tracked conversions).

[ecommerceprofit]

engine thanks for the response also sorry about triple post. I used "edit post" all the time and since I have been away for so long I could not find this function and assumed it was gone. I should have looked harder. Thanks for all the responses :-) I just changed my campaign to clicks rather than impressions and will report back when I have more data.

[FranticFish]

This is all a bit vague, my experiences with Google Ads this year, hope it helps.

With the new accounts I've opened this year I have the impression that if you're in a smaller niche where there is not a lot of confirmed keyword data (and therefore traffic) that Google is more reluctant than it used to be to let you get started.

To be fair to them this is does not appear to be totally related to your budget (although I think it could be related to your expected spend).

I have a small spend campaign in a busy niche that is doing great. I have two bigger (double) spend campaigns running in
- a more messy niche where the keywords I want are really hard to zero in on because searchers express themselves in MANY different ways; and
- a niche where intent is better expressed, but the keywords I really want are few and far between.
These two have both been struggling - BADLY, the the point where I'm considering turning them off. Not only are the reported keywords awful but the conversions are too.

My strategy with both for now is to widen the net a little and (together with a bigger negative kw list) introduce some more general terms (I'm advertising for service providers and I've thrown in some mixed intent / more informational terms) in an attempt to just push some traffic through the account and get some spend going.

I used to get very frustrated by the recommended bid software, but now I think this is keyed into a certain spend level.

For instance I frequently get recommendations to up my bid (sometimes double or even triple it) to be on page 1 when I'm 100% top 4 and 45% or more first place. I used to think this was designed to encourage bidding wars, but given that hardly anyone uses Manual CPC these days, I think it's more to do with them being confident that they can exhaust your set budget - whatever that is.

For smaller campaigns, my impression is that Google needs to be confident that they can rinse out your daily budget. This doesn't have to be that big, but they need to be sure that they can spend it all easily. If they are sure, even if the budget is small, you're good. If they're not, then you're going to struggle to get a look in because other parts of the algorithm will punish you for being on the edges of search intent rather than in the middle of it, and for not using terms that they can fit into one of their AI buckets.

[ecommerceprofit]

I just saw your message today. Thank you FranticFish - lots of good information! I just wanted to log in to tell everyone that my ads are running nice and smooth now. I took off the exact search with brackets and made match the looser phrase match. Then all it took is some time. Good to see Google can work.

[FranticFish]

Glad it was of some use and good to hear that you've cracked it.

[rlopes]

That's nice to hear.
How much time after changing the campaign did you start seeing the results?

[ecommerceprofit]

Just a couple of days