Advertising in search engines such as Google is a great way to promote home care agencies, direct access physical therapy, and many other types of services. There are a lot of people looking for your services on Google right now. For instance, in most service areas, there are tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of searches about non-medical home care every month. Imagine being able to get your message out to those people. In traditional push advertising, your ads go to audiences who may or may not need your services in the next few months. Search advertising produces fast return on investment because the ads are shown to people who are looking for your services now. One of the things that confuses people about search advertising is that the company owners often cannot find their own ads in Google. They ask “Why can’t I see my ads in Google?” There are three very important answers for that question.

1. You Should Not Be Able to See Your Own Ads in Google

If you can see your own ad in Google, you either have a robust budget for Google, or you just got lucky. Consider your budget. At $169 per month, Brazzell Marketing Agency’s Search Results Now program will typically have ads appearing in 3,000 to 5,000 searches per month. That’s a big number, and it’s often enough to produce one new home care client per month. However, even when a business is appearing in 3,000 to 5,000 searches per month, that’s often only 0.1% to 2% of the total searches available. When your ads are running at that $169, $269, or $369 budget, every day you look for your ad in Google search results, you may have a one in 100 chance of actually seeing it.

Furthermore, you can’t simply search 100-200 times to see all the advertisers in a particular category on Google. If you keep typing searches trying to make your ad appear, Google will either show you largely the same ads or stop showing you ads altogether.

Moreover, keep in mind that if your search advertising budget is under $469 per month, your ads will likely not be running for several hours each day. Most marketing professionals set search advertising to use your budget on a per-click basis, and they set a daily cap so you won’t get charged more than agreed. When your search advertising campaign meets that daily cap, your ads simply turn off. It is very likely that while you are looking for your ads in Google, they are off. During those off hours, you could search a million times and never see your ads. If you would like to appear more hours out of the day, no problem. Increase your budget.

2. You Should Not Try to See Your Own Ads in Google

If you have never run search advertising before, seeing the ad appear on Google yourself is gratifying. We get it. Do it if you must, but know that it harms your campaign. If you type a search, see your ad, but don’t click your ad, this will lower your click-through rate and make Google less inclined to show your ad under those same keywords in the future. If you search for your ad on Google and click it, this takes money out of your daily budget and likely results in 100 fewer customers seeing your ad that day. Nothing good comes from trying to find your own ads in Google.

3. Use Correct Methods to Assess Your Search Ad Performance

Most importantly, spending time looking for your own ads in Google search results is a distraction from effective management. An executive’s time is better spent evaluating key performance indicators such as impressions, clicks, website traffic, and keywords. It’s not “Did you see your own ad?” It’s “How many people are seeing my ads? How many people are clicking my ads? And were those relevant clicks?”

With Brazzell Marketing Agency’s Search Results Now campaign, clients receive monthly reports highlighting key performance indicators along with a narrative description to help it make sense. You’ll see how many people saw your ads, how many people clicked them, and even what people were typing when they clicked your ads. We focus a lot on that last question, because it shows the relevance of the clicks. For instance, if you are a home care agency, someone typed “home care agencies near me,” and then clicked your ad, that was a relevant click. If, on the other hand, they typed “CNA Training Schools near me,” and clicked on your ad, that was an irrelevant click. Irrelevant clicks happen, but the role of the campaign manager is to try to minimize them.

Companies can get early check-in data simply by emailing and asking how the ads are performing. Companies should also feel free to tell Brazzell Marketing Agency or other campaign managers if the calls and emails generated by search ads are showing a pattern of irrelevance (for instance: outside the service area, looking for a different service, etc.). Modifications to the campaign may be able to fix or improve any unhelpful patterns you notice.

For third-party verification of your search ad performance, remember the visitor tracking on your website. Brazzell Marketing Agency installs visitor tracking software on all custom websites we build. Visitor tracking information will tell you where visitors came from. When you see an increase in referrals from search sites such as Google, you know that your ads are working.

Try Not to Watch the Pot Boil

Finally, while we are on the subject, here’s another common pitfall. Try to avoid spending more time monitoring your digital ads than the ads are worth. Key performance indicators on digital ads are very interesting. We love studying them. However, keep in mind that if you are spending $169 per month on a search advertising campaign, that’s $39 per week. Your time as a manager is likely worth $70 per hour to the company. It’s a losing game to invest a higher value in time assessing a campaign than you spent on the campaign itself. Try to give yourself a set schedule for assessing and tuning your online advertising. For lower level budgets or established campaigns, monthly is often the right schedule.

Conclusion: Why Can’t I See My Search Ads In Google?

The most useful answer to “Why can’t I see my search ads in Google?” is “Stop that.” Your ads in Google are helpful to your business, but they are like one person in a crowded football stadium. It’s normal for you to not see them. Looking for them can harm your campaign performance. The correct way to assess your search ad performance is to gather information on impressions / ad views, clicks to the website, and what people were typing when they clicked your ads. You can get this in regular reports or by asking for early check-in data. By assessing the valuable data about your ads, you’ll be in a position to make the best marketing decisions.