This actually happened last time, only.. it was 4 hours before my ads went live.
24 is a bit too long of a wait. Do ads only get approved/go live on weekdays now?
I made the mistake of changing my display urls friday afternoon (added www.). Nearly all traffic stopped immediately and hasn't return.
I did hear from someone before that your account "slows down" when your CTR is low, but I'm not sure if it's true or not.
Of course, there is no chance of a weekend change showing on either partner or content sites until at the very least Monday. Reviews only happen during business hours, oddly enough. You'd think with Google's size and profits they could run 24/7, look at all the jobs they could create.
Mr Thomas,
If your ad text or any of your keywords fell into the sensitive category, they will have to be reviewed by a human. Many, many words are sensitive. Words like children, combat, war and many more obvious ones will keep your ad from showing until it is approved manually. The ads diagnostic tool will show "You have no ads that match the search term ..." for each keyword if an ad is not approved.
Sailor,
Perhaps your traffic tends to come from the Search network (mine does) and again, changes made to an ad must be reviewed by a human before they'll again show on Search or Content. Until then they'll only show on Google.com itself (unless they're "sensitive" in which case they're out of the game completely).
patient2all
It's now been close to 2 days and the ads aren't showing up. None of the keywords can be considered sensitive, as it's the name of a product.
Time for *another* email :(
Thanks for the info.
It isn't too much of a mystery. They simply stopped my ads showing on everything but Google search (and it appears ask.com). So, I'm left with about 8% of normal visitors. But it is almost unbelievable that my account goes down for likely 4 days because of this...That is a lot of K$ for me and G to lose.
A side note: I'm noticing visitors from G search ads have a 30% less CTR compared to visitors from everywhere, including content. Too bad I can't exclude G search only.
Thsi can happen to ad groups that had been running previously without problem.
You may or may not pass the review...
I did file for an exception for the all-caps acronym "HDTV", but I've filed (and been approved almost immediately) for those kinds of exceptions before.
I've been an advertiser for over 4 years on Adwords and never saw anything like this delay before. But it's also been weeks since I last put up any new ads, so is this new?
In any case, I put up/changed ads the middle of last week, (Tuesday June 28th. & Wedsnesday June 29th.). They showed immediately on Google itself and were on the partner network within 24 hours.
One thing everyone should be aware of is the schedule of the ad approval people. Oddly, they work strictly business hours, Monday to Friday (a little Saturday according to AWA). I think, but am not sure, that they operate out of Ireland (can anyone confirm?)
Therefore, if you make a change on Friday, it's going to be Monday or even Tuesday before the ad can be reviewed. It appears they accumulate quite a backlog over the weekend.
The ideal time to make changes to ads appears to be Wednesday and Thursday. They're often approved the same day.
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BTW, normally your ads will appear on Google.com within minutes of putting them up. Google will take a chance on the unreviewed ad. They all must be seen by someone though before joining the Partner (AOL,Earthlink,etc) network or the Content(adsense,etc) Networks.
If the computer flags your ad or keyword as sensitive, it will show no where until reviewed by a human. I've had a great # of ads flagged as sensitive and I don't know why and you can't tell why either. Even if it went through before, you don't know they aren't always adding words to their 'sensitive' lists. For that matter, perhaps the program that flags sensitive topics works as well as the Keyword Estimation Tool :)
I've also had ads just stop for about 2 weeks, then I'd notice and email them and a few days later they were running again -- no explanation.
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I think it's a holiday weekend not just in the US, so bar-b-que and don't try to apply pure logic to where none may exist :)
patient2all
