Why It’s a Bad Idea to Search Your Own PPC Ads

Want to attract new patients with PPC… for the lowest cost per lead possible?

Then there is one thing you’ll want to avoid at all costs.

And that’s clicking on your own PPC ads.

Clicking on your own PPC ads is like your adolescent son standing in front of the refrigerator waiting for a new midnight snack to magically show up while you pay the electric bill. Every minute he leaves the door open costs you money and has zero benefit to anyone – including your son.

PPC is the same. Checking on your own PPC campaign can cost you dearly and can destroy all the hard work your PPC provider did to set it up for you. To use another cooking analogy, a watched pot never boils.

While it is tempting to want to check your own Google Ads – here are the 4 reasons you should avoid it.

4 Reasons to Avoid Searching for and Clicking on Your Google Ads

1. If you search on your ad and don’t click on it you’re indicating to Google that it’s not relevant. For example, if you search for hearing aids or orthodontics in your town, and your ad comes up at the top of the page, that should be good. Right? Wrong. When your ad shows up for your search and then you don’t click on it you’re inadvertently telling Google it’s irrelevant to the keywords you used in your search. Do that a few times and you’re training Google to stop showing your ads. When you do this, it will also artificially inflate your “impressions” and mess up your conversion data. In other words, your best ad for attracting new patients will look like a poor performer….and Google will stop showing it.
2. If you see your ad and click on it. You’ve just paid for that click and gotten nothing from it. But it gets worse…
3. If you click on the ad, get to the landing page and then close it without calling or filling in a form…that counts as a bounce and Google starts to think the landing page is not engaging or relevant either.
4. If you do this more than once…Google may start to think you are maliciously trying to harm a campaign and block your IP. Or it may assume you’re OK, but not interested in that ad and just not serve it to you more than once. Either way, you won’t see it even though it’s live.

In short: Your search behavior sends signals to Google that ultimately affect your campaigns. That behavior factors into your overall quality score which influences both how frequently your ad will be shown and how much you’ll pay per lead.

What Should You Do Instead?

If you search for your ad and can’t find it, the natural reaction is to assume there’s something wrong when in fact there may be a perfectly good reason for the ad not showing up. In fact, there are probably several reasons including…

1. It’s optimized for conversions. When setting up your ads, your PPC provider sets the campaign up to optimize conversions. Not only do marketers choose things like which days and times of day to show them, but also on what types of devices, in what regions, what types of bids and so on. Your Google PPC ads are designed to show up when the conditions are most likely to lead to a conversion while not costing you an arm and a leg. That means they are not always going to show…and that’s intentional.
2. Your ad may be hard to find to save you money. Pay-per-click advertising operates on an auction system, the ads that show up right now in response to your query are not the same ads that will show up in a few minutes. These auctions are happening real-time and changing constantly. Searching for your ads will only tell you who won the auction at that moment.

If you really want to know whether your ads are working you need to look at longer-term data, like how frequently the ad showed up for specific terms over the course of 30 days and whether people clicked on it.

By now you should realize that searching for your own ads is not the way to find out how your ads are doing.

Instead, just ask us to run a report or check your performance using your analytics.

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