Google Ads Not Spending? 4 Fixes to Get Campaigns Moving

Google Ads not spending? 

In this episode of Google Ads Unleashed, host Jeremy breaks down four key fixes to get your campaigns moving again. From catching hidden disapprovals to adjusting bid strategies, checking Merchant Center errors, and improving quality signals, you’ll learn the exact steps to diagnose and resolve stuck campaigns.

 Whether you’re running Search or Shopping, this guide will help you troubleshoot why your ads aren’t serving—and how to fix it fast.

👉 Need more help? Reach out to Jeremy on LinkedIn or via email to get personalised support for your campaigns.

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

Hello guys and welcome back to Google ads at least. Hope everyone is doing fabulously this Monday morning, and I want to share with you this week a really straightforward or diagnostic tip for a problem that we've had last week, and that is what to do when your ads don't show so scenario was as follows, we've got a new client in August. They were in pretty bad shape, basically, you know, the ad account still had, like, expanded text ads, keywords that had the plus sign in front of it for port match modifier not been a thing, I think, in three years, or something like that. So lots of it with it wrong, basically. And one of the key things that was pretty wrong as well was the product feed. The product feed really wasn't in good shape, okay, so we had to make new feeds. But in the meantime, we are trying to run ads, of course, still on the old product feed, which was a manual one, which is basically a little bit shambolic. Okay, so far, so good. But we had an issue. The ads didn't show. We couldn't get it to work. So team asked me, what do they do? And this has happened before. In fact, I get this very often when we get, for instance, brand new ad accounts in coaching, and people ask me, How do I kick start my ads? What can I do when my ads aren't showing? And I want to share with you four things that you can go through when your ads and showing to ensure that there is nothing wrong. Let's start with the word disapprovals, okay, so if your ads and showing let's and are not delivering check for disapprovals. First, there could be disapprovals in several areas. First of all, your ads could be disapproved. For instance, it could be not you have the wrong link in there that the show to being pointed to a 404 page. Or you could be having another issue that might not be working. Let's, let's say, for instance, copyright violation or something like that. This has even happened to me when I've launched new demanding campaigns. Looked a day later, and turns out, all ads disapproved. Nothing was serving right. So have a look at the disapprovals first, and that is the first thing that you should look at. Then look at the keywords. If you run in search campaigns, is anything disapproved or does something not work? Sometimes keywords need approval as well. For instance, if they contain certain medical terms or similar, but they can sometimes be low search volume, for instance, and not serve, right? And then you'll have to look for different keywords or try to shorten them and simplify them, or you have to go broad match, or something like that, right? So sometimes that does kick start even low volume keywords as well. Then the next thing that you will want to look into is your merchant center. So for instance, you might want to go into Merchant Center and see how I'm run. Want to run a shopping campaign, but my products are disapproved or something is wrong in Merchant Center, for instance, I don't have my shipping policy there, or I have some other form of problem. So basically, all around disapprovals make sure that nothing is sort of not running which should be running, and go through all the settings and ensure that you clear this error, and that could already be the reason that your ads aren't running and are not showing. Now, the second thing I want to go through is campaign settings, bid strategy, okay, which directly links with my third point, but I'll get to that in a bit, and that is, sometimes your campaign settings are wrong. For instance, you accidentally may have chosen the wrong Merchant Center to advertise with, or you have some sent got a language restriction which is not spoken in your country, or you got accident location exclusions, or you have, for instance, sometimes I've seen this before as well, that sometimes you get, like, the wrong location targeting right even when you set everything correctly, Google sometimes automatically saves campaigns still with the wrong settings. That's why always when you publish something. Then go through it again a second time and make sure that all of the settings are correct. And with that, also bid strategy, because what can happen is, if you're very low in conversion volume, for instance, or if you have a brand new account and don't have any conversions, you sometimes will not have your ad served because the bid strategy is too conservative. Okay, you will sometimes see limited by bid strategy as an error in that campaign as well. Basically, it means your bids are much conservative and you're not even in the auction, right? You can't set the bids enough. So usually, the the the easiest way is to just take a step back, if you think of it as a ladder, from manual CPC being the lowest, then go into a semi automated strategy such as Max clicks, maybe even with a bit cap then, which is a bit more conservative, then to something like maximize conversion. So conversion value maximization to then target ROAs or Target CPA, take a step down from the ladder. Let's say you've set a target CPA and that doesn't seem to be delivering, removed or either increase the target CPA or lower your ROAs target or remove it completely to max conversion value or max conversion so just give it a while for it to deliver. If it's on max conversions already, let's not do it go down to max clicks. If that's not working, go down to manual CPC, etc, etc. So that's a pretty easy way to go down the ladder of the bid strategies in order to get spend onto your campaigns. Then my third point is quality score. So sometimes your quality score and keywords is too bad. Okay, so that means Google, despite good bids and despite everything else being correct, was still not served because it just doesn't really like your ads. Your ads are crap. Your landing page is crap. You will have to fix that. I've got another podcast about how to fix quality score. Go listen to that one. To have a have a sort of look on how to do that. But this also applies to shopping, right? So many people don't know this because it's not quantified. Google has admitted that there is a quality segment. You can even see the Merchant Center when you go to, I think it's shop quality. It says you can improve your rankings by improving certain aspects of the Merchant Center. So Google here admits that clearly the relevance of your of your product page, of your audience, of your art, so of your offer, I want to say, is on how your audience interacts with the product page is a massive part the quality score. And of course, it would be right. Why would they do it for keywords, but not for shopping? Just because they don't have a score for it, and shopping doesn't mean that it's something to do you need to take care of. So go through Merchant Center, fill it all out, make it nice. Try to pander to the algorithm. Attributes to your to your listings, make it as nice as possible, so that Google loves you. Improve that quality score. Okay, I call it quality score, but you know what I mean? I'm just trying to keep the lingo going of of Google ads here. And then lastly, budget. Sometimes, if you set the budget simply too little, you cannot the algorithm has no room to breathe, right? So sometimes it's best to just increase the budgets and see what happens. That could be the last resort. And the fourth and last resort that you can refer to in order to get your campaign suspend. Maybe I want to add a fifth point, but that's more general advice. It's not really a separate point, but it is time. Give yourself some time, right? Because if you expect for it to spend straight away, you sometimes ads need to be approved, and it takes a couple of days for the algorithm to kick in and campaign suspend, right? Give it for eight hours. Give it three days. Give it five days. If nothing has happened, then we start to have a problem, right? Like that. That is the territory where we get into. This is some weird stuff going on, okay? So just give it time. That is super, super important, and that's how we resolved our issue as well. So we've basically reverted back the bit strategy ladder and then have that, yeah, that is what was holding us back. So we keep going to keep it probably on max clicks now for a while, then we'll probably switch to max conversions, and then we're going to implement a target ROAs or Target CPA, depending on what we want to do with this campaign, and that's how we fix that. I just want to also say one more thing is that this is all now strictly about the delivery in the ad account. If you don't actually see your own ads in the wild, there could be many reasons for that. It could be that you're just not. Up in Google's audience, right? It could be that if you have a setting on, such as only bid for new customers when you're on the customer list, that you're not seeing your own ads. It could be, and this is a common one, clients love to Google themselves. Oh, I can't see my own ad. Well, No shit, Sherlock, because you Google yourself 50 times a day and don't click on your ad and never buy from yourself. Of course, Google will never show you you an ad anymore, right? Or it could also be that you're in such few auctions that you're not covering the entire market. Okay? So these are a lot of reasons you can maybe not see own ad, but this episode was strictly about making sure those ads deliver, and if you're stuck with any problem at any given point, simply reach out. Send me an email. Jeremy at young and digital dot marketing, send me a message on LinkedIn. Jeremy and Google ads, you'll find me there. We're still hiring. So if you are media buyer listening, and you think you are a Google Ads rock star, please get in touch as well with hiring for a senior media buyer position, specifically Google ads. Do let me know. I'd be very interested. And as always, many thanks for listening. I'll see you next week in the next episode you.