Viewing Your Google Ads in the Wild

When you begin an AdWords campaign, it’s so tempting to immediately start performing searches from your browser to see where the ads are showing up and what they look like. Without realizing it, you will pay for it … either directly or indirectly.

Direct Effects

If you search for your Google ads and happen to click on one of them, you will be charged for that click as you would when anyone else clicks on your ads. You certainly don’t want to be draining your budget to visit your own website.

Indirect Effects

Even if you know that you shouldn’t click on your ads, you’re still creating ad impressions just by searching for them. Impressions are the number of times your ad is fetched to be shown to a searcher. Google looks at the number of clicks and impressions your ads have to determine the click-through rate. The click-through rate has a major impact on the quality score your ads receive, which in turn affects where it appears. By adding more impressions, you are hurting the ads’ click-through rate and its position.

The Solution

Thankfully, Google has created a tool that will allow us to search for our ads without making impressions on them. It’s called the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t even have to be an AdWords customer to use this tool. Try for yourself below!

How to Use the Tool

Start by entering the location from which you’d like to see search results and the type of device you want to see. Then you’ll enter in your keyword search phrase in the top box and click “Preview.”

Scroll down to view a preview of the results for that specific search. You’ll see a screen that looks just like Google’s normal results, but none of these links will be clickable since it’s only a preview. The top three spots are AdWords ads, as are those along the right-hand side of the page. You can also review your organic rankings by looking below the ads section, and you can see more than just the first page of results by scrolling to the bottom and clicking Google’s links to later pages.

There’s no good reason not to use this free tool provided by Google. It allows you to see the results you’re looking for without doing any harm to your campaigns. At The Web Guys, we know every dollar matters to you, and it matters to us too. We equip our clients with this important knowledge because it increase our chances of getting the best results possible. If you’re ready to partner with professionals, contact us at (317) 805-4933.