Suppose you’re currently running a Google Advertising campaign for your hearing practice. You might be wondering how your paid ads will look when searching for a specific word, where they are positioned, or if they even appear at all. However, this interest has the potential to damage your campaigns and is undoubtedly not a wise move.
A digital ad is not like a billboard, something you can drive by and admire when it suits you. It’s a dynamic piece of code whose future behavior is defined by how you interact with it.
Let’s analyze some of the reasons why Google searching for your ad is a bad idea.
You could hurt your campaign
Google Ads uses a pay-per-click model, so you get charged every time someone clicks your ad. This means if you click on your ad, it takes money away from your campaign. Conversely, if you search for your ad and don’t click on it, it tells Google’s machine learning algorithm that the ad isn’t what you were searching for, raising your cost-per-click and making it more difficult for the ad to show for similar searches by other people.
It gives a ‘false impression’
The number of impressions that your ad registers will increase if you search for your ads. If you search maybe once or twice, it’s not too much of a big deal. But doing so repeatedly and frequently leads to bad data. This will offer an incorrect view of how many users your ad has reached, making your ad campaign challenging to measure accurately.
It will show that your audience is bigger than it is, leading to poor advertising decisions being made in the future.
This can also lead to a decrease in click-through rates (CTRs) over time, which is another indicator that will have a negative effect and show an inaccurate percentage. These modifications can be detrimental to the efficiency of your advertising and should be avoided.
One search will not show you how a campaign is performing
Your ad may or may not show up when you search for it, but how does that show you how well the campaign performs? It doesn’t. Instead, focus on KPIs like phone calls from ads and contact form submissions from the landing page. It’s fun to see your ad on Google, but it will not help you determine performance, and it may even end up hurting you, as explained earlier.
Your ads may not show for every search
Even the best ad campaigns with astronomical budgets do not show up for every relevant keyword search. So many factors go into whether your ad is shown, including the time of day, age of the searcher, a device used, ad extensions, and more.
Because of this, it is not possible to assess your campaign performance based on your ads, not showing during one search. You may not even be in the target demographic and are ineligible to see the ads. Again, you want to focus on the outcomes of your campaign. Are you getting calls and booking appointments? That will show you how well the ads are doing.
Also remember that your ads might disappear from your search results if you continue to search for them. Google will stop displaying your PPC ads to you even though you search for your ads but do not click on them, because they think those ads are not relevant for your search experience. Remember, Google isn’t aware that you are the business owner – it sees you as a regular search engine user. As such, it doesn’t want to supply its users with any ads that seem irrelevant or unimportant.
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Are you interested in starting an ad campaign for your hearing practice? Our team of specialists is here to help – don’t hesitate to contact us today!