You worked hard on a strategy for Google Ads and now you are so excited to test it out. You thought you have all of your ducks in a row... you have the budget, you set the campaign type, you considered the best bid strategy, you optimized the campaign settings, you researched the best keywords for your business, you created some really great ad copy... everything is up and running! But….something is just not right! After several days of running your campaign, you hardly see your budget spending. 

In this article, we will investigate what MIGHT be the problem causing this...

The first, and most important thing that you should check in the competition. There is a chance that you are in an industry in which the competition is SO high that the cost required for your keywords is much higher than the maximum CPC you have set. In other words, you simply can’t afford to bid on the keywords you are targeting because you have set a ceiling that is too low. 

Check out some of these expensive keywords below...

If your CPC is set to $30 or below, you couldn’t afford any of these keywords, so you should either start looking for keywords that are cheaper than $30 OR increase your CPC bid to a higher amount.

Another potential issue that you campaign might be running into is that your keywords Quality Score is too low for your ads to trigger. When thinking about ways for improving this metric, you definitely need to know the components of it. 

Consider the following components of Quality Scores...

• CTR - The likelihood of your ad to be clicked when triggered for a certain search term is too low and thus considered potentially irrelevant.
• Landing page experience - You need to send your audience to pages that are matching  the content of your ad. This could be because your ad copy is incongruent to the page that the ad directs the user to, or a number of other reasons. The most important thing to remember is that you should definitely avoid sending traffic to error pages, Google can tell and will penalize you for it.
• Ad relevance - This is briefly mentioned in the above section, but Google is constantly checking to make sure that your landing page is in line with the content of your ad, so make sure that these are aligned. 

So what happens if your quality score is low? If your Quality Score is low, this will automatically lead your ad rank to be low too, since QS is an important component in the determination of Ad Rank = Bid * Quality score.

If the issue is your quality score, raising your bids to fall within the target CPC will not help you. Rather work on the components of your quality score so that your ads are more relevant in the eyes of the Google algorithm.

Another possible issue to consider, which gets frequently overlooked is the idea that maybe you have seasonal products, so in certain times of the year there may be fewer or no searches at all. If you are selling Christmas ornaments, people generally don’t buy those in June, so there’s a chance that the ads are fine, the quality score is fine, it’s just not being searched as often as you’d like. 

The last thing to consider is perhaps that your CTR isn't as good as it could be. This means your ads are being shown to every matching search query, but your Ads aren't appealing to the search users so they aren't clicked as often as they could be. You are paying for clicks nor impressions, so although your ad may be showing all the time, people are just not clicking on it. Ensure you use at least 2 ad variations per Ad Group and measure them for quality and performance, adjusting to try and improve CTR. 

While most people complain about spending their ad budget too quickly, not spending it at all could be just as big of an issue. You are putting dollars into advertising for a reason, so you want the ads to work! Try investigating some of these tips on your troublesome campaigns and see if maybe the solution is more simple than you expected. Sometimes the smallest fixes can yield the best results! Try something different, shake things up, and give it a moment to play out… you never know what will happen!