Why are my Google Ads not delivering, spending or getting impressions?

Google Ads runs campaign diagnostics on every campaign type. Google says it checks more than 90 signals across a campaign, and reads the past week for three things: whether the campaign served any impressions, whether it brought any of the actions its goal counts, and whether it was able to spend a majority of its average daily budget.

1. 01Go to Campaigns › Campaigns and select one campaign.
2. 02Open Overview or Insights from the section menu. The diagnostics panel is on both, with no ad group selected.
3. 03Select View campaign diagnostics at the foot of the panel, or View details on an issue, for what Google found and what it suggests.

It sorts what it finds by area, among them Account for a suspension or a billing issue, Ads, Bidding & budget for a misconfigured strategy or a target or budget that limits the campaign, Goals for conversion tracking and Products for a Merchant Center feed. For a campaign that hasn’t run long enough it has limited history, and says so.

Google’s pages also name the recommendations to look for on the Recommendations page when a campaign doesn’t run: Campaign hasn’t started or has ended, Create or unpause an ad group, Account budget exhausted, All ads disapproved and, for Search, Add or unpause keywords.

A campaign created this week can be set up correctly and still show nothing. Google’s pages give three things it waits for.

• Its start date. A new campaign’s start date is today unless you set another, and it starts as soon as its first ads are approved. With a later start date it reads Pending until that day.
• Ad review. Google reviews every new or edited ad before it runs. Its ad review page says most ads are reviewed within one business day. Its page on Search campaigns that aren’t running says 24 to 48 hours, and up to 5 business days for a new account or an image or video format. Editing during a review restarts it: Google says a change to a budget, a bid strategy or ad text resets the review clock.
• Bidding that is still learning. A campaign on automated bidding needs time to optimize. Google says a bid strategy typically takes one to 2 conversion cycles to calibrate, and for Performance Max it recommends waiting 7 to 14 days. Its optimization tips for Performance Max go further, and say to run a new campaign for at least 6 weeks. Manual CPC has no learning period.

Google draws the line at 3 business days. If an ad has no impressions by then, it says the campaign may still be in the bid strategy learning phase, and to go through the common reasons if it lasts. For a new campaign with little data, its page suggests starting on Maximize clicks or Manual CPC for 5 to 7 days, then moving to a strategy that bids for conversions once there are enough of them, 30 or more in 30 days as its example.

An ad that passes review reads Eligible and starts to run. Where it reads Eligible and isn’t running, Google’s first check is that the campaign it belongs to isn’t paused. If an ad is under review for more than 2 full business days, check its status, and after more than a week Google says to contact support. The disapproved ads guide covers an ad that fails review, and the bid strategy learning guide what restarts the learning. Once the campaign is showing ads, the guide to how long Google Ads takes to work covers the waits that follow, and when its results can be judged.

Google marks a campaign Not eligible when it has no ad groups, or when all of its ad groups, all of its ads or all of its keywords are paused or deleted. The campaign itself stays enabled, so it sits in your list beside the ones that run.

The commonest way in is turning a campaign back on. Google says resuming a campaign doesn’t start your ads if you also paused the ad groups or keywords inside it: you resume each paused element yourself.

1. 01Go to Campaigns › Ad groups and read the Status column. Paused is an ad group you stopped. Incomplete is one missing a necessary part, such as keywords or ads. Not eligible covers an ad group with no ads or with all of them paused, one with no keywords, and one whose ads are all disapproved.
2. 02On the Ads page, read each ad’s status. A Disapproved ad gets no impressions.
3. 03In the keyword table, look for keywords you paused, and for ones Google paused: a keyword with no impressions in 13 months is paused with the note Keyword paused due to low activity.
4. 04Enable what is meant to run, from the bottom up: keywords and ads, then the ad group.

The keywords per ad group guide has what an ad group needs before it can serve. For every disapproval in the account at once, Google points to Policy manager, which the disapproved ads guide covers.

Google gives a rule of thumb: if other campaigns in your account are running, you don’t have to check the account’s status. When none is, its pages name five things.

• A payment. Check the Billing Summary and Transactions pages for a declined payment or an outstanding balance. The account may stop running until it’s paid, and Google says to allow one to 2 business days after a payment for ads to resume. On a prepaid account whose balance has run out, ad groups read Not eligible with the reason Campaign suspended until you add funds.
• An account budget. An account on monthly invoicing stops serving when its account budget is spent or reaches its end date, and a new budget serves nothing before its start date. Account budgets are under Billing › Account budgets.
• A suspension. A suspended account shows a notification, and Google emails the reason. Its suspended account tool checks the status for you.
• A security review. Google says a review of an account’s security can mean zero impressions or a temporary daily spending limit, can’t be expedited, and puts no notification in the account. It can follow a period of inactivity or unconfirmed users on the account. What Google says to check is under Admin › Access and security: that every user with administrative access is authorized, and that their email domains are among the allowed domains.
• Advertiser verification. Google can pause an account until verification is complete. Its page says to go to Admin, select Account within the Policy menu, and start the verification task listed there.

Google’s page on the Ad preview and diagnosis tool starts in the same place. Before you diagnose an ad that isn’t showing, verify the account: ads won’t serve while it is undergoing billing verification or is suspended over a security concern.

Eligible means a campaign can show ads. Whether it does is decided auction by auction. These are the reasons Google’s pages give for an eligible campaign that serves nothing, or close to it, in the order worth checking.

• A target out of reach. Google says a target CPA or target ROAS set without considering what the campaign has achieved may limit the strategy until the campaign doesn’t serve at all. Where a target CPA sits well below the campaign’s historical average, raise it. Google suggests 10 to 20% where the strategy reads limited, or a lower target ROAS. The Target CPA guide works out a target the campaign can reach.
• A bid too low. With a very low bid a campaign enters or wins few auctions, and Google says its ads may have no impressions. A keyword that reads Below first page bid estimate is active and isn’t reaching the first page. The keyword bidding guide covers what to bid.
• A limited bid strategy. Hover over Limited for which of four things limits it: the search volume available, a bid limit, a budget, or the strategy itself. Inactive means the campaigns, keywords or ads on the strategy are paused, or a prepaid budget is spent.
• A small budget. A campaign that reads Eligible (limited) because of its budget may be, in Google’s words, not serving or under serving. Its guideline is a daily budget of at least 10 times your expected cost per click, or 2 to 3 times your target CPA. The Limited by budget guide says when a raise pays.
• Keywords nobody searches. Google says a Search campaign that targets only a small list of low search volume keywords is likely unable to run. A keyword marked Low search volume is inactive until its searches increase. Bids, Quality Score and ads don’t change the status, and Google checks it again in a week.
• Targeting too narrow. One postal code, a small radius or a city with a low population may keep a campaign from serving. So may an audience list under the size Google requires, 100 active users in the last 30 days on Search: for a new Search campaign Google says to set audiences to Observation, not Targeting. And on an ad schedule, your ads don’t show if no one searches for your keywords in the hours you chose. The location targeting guide, the RLSA guide and the ad schedule guide cover each.
• Another campaign of yours. Where two campaigns or ad groups are eligible for the same auctions, Google says traffic may go primarily to one of them. The duplicate keywords guide finds the overlap.
• Conversion tracking. A campaign that bids for conversions and records too few of them, or none because tracking is broken, may have limited serving. Google notes that the status Eligible (Misconfigured) with the message that your website is missing a Google tag often means the campaign has recorded no biddable conversion in the last 28 days. The conversion tracking guide checks the setup.
• Ad Rank. An ad has to meet Google’s Ad Rank thresholds to show. The Search lost IS (rank) column gives the share of the time it didn’t because of rank, though Google warns that impression share may not populate for a campaign with too little traffic. The search impression share guide reads the column.

Google describes an average daily budget as how much you are roughly comfortable spending each day over the month, and says that on some days a campaign might not reach it, and on others might exceed it. So a day under budget isn’t a fault by itself.

A campaign that spends a little every day and never comes near its budget has the causes above in a milder form: bids or a target that win few auctions, or too few searches to win. Three places show which.

• Campaign diagnostics. It reads whether the campaign was able to spend a majority of its average daily budget in the past week.
• The budget report. Hover over the campaign’s budget in the Budget column, select the pencil icon, then View budget report. A Monthly forecast far under the Monthly spending limit is a campaign Google expects to leave budget unspent. The report doesn’t cover Performance Max.
• The budget recommendation. Google shows no recommended budget for a campaign that rarely meets its average daily budget, or one with limited data. So where a campaign with history shows none, its budget isn’t what holds it back.

The opposite complaint, a day that spends more than its budget, is Google’s pacing at work, and the budget pacing guide explains the limits.

A Shopping campaign shows products, so most of what stops it is in Merchant Center. Google’s page for Shopping campaigns that aren’t running adds these to the reasons above.

• The Merchant Center account. If every Shopping campaign in the account has stopped, Google says to confirm that the Merchant Center account isn’t suspended and is linked to Google Ads. The Merchant Center guide covers a suspension.
• Products that aren’t eligible. Google calls the Products tab the fastest check: in Google Ads, Assets › Products, then the Diagnostics tab, for whether products read Ready to serve. A product is ineligible when it’s disapproved, and when it’s out of stock.
• Expired product data. Products expire from Merchant Center 30 days after their last refresh, unless you added them directly in Merchant Center.
• Shipping and country. Without shipping set up for the country the campaign targets, Google says the campaign may not run.
• Review. New or edited products and data sources take 24 to 48 hours to be reviewed.

Performance Max has one of its own. Google says a Performance Max campaign won’t enter review without a primary conversion goal, which leaves its assets reading Under review for good. The Shopping feed guide covers product issues, and the Performance Max guide the campaign itself.

Cedar & Pine has six campaigns enabled. To find the ones that aren’t delivering, and tell why:

1. 01Go to Campaigns › Campaigns and set the date range to yesterday. A whole day is in, where today’s isn’t.
2. 02Read Impr. and Cost for each enabled campaign. A campaign with no impressions spent nothing.
3. 03For each campaign at zero, read the Status column and hover over it for Google’s reason.
4. 04Change the date range to the 14 days before. A campaign that showed ads on every one of them stopped. One that showed none never started.
5. 05For a campaign that stopped, open Campaigns › Change history for the day it did. It lists each change with the user who made it.

Sofas — Phrase stopped. Hovering over its status gives the reason: all of its ads are paused. It had impressions on each of the 14 days before, spent about $66 on a typical one, and brought 13 conversions in those two weeks. Each day it stays dark is a day of that. Change history for yesterday shows who paused the ads. The fix is on the Ads page: enable the ones meant to run.

Armchairs — Phrase never started. It has no impressions in either date range, and its reason is that all of its ad groups are paused. The campaign was paused months ago with its three ad groups. A week ago it was enabled again, and the ad groups weren’t. It costs nothing, and the campaign someone meant to restart isn’t running. Enable its ad groups, check that their ads and keywords are enabled too, or pause the campaign if it isn’t meant to run.

The two look the same in yesterday’s figures, and the days before are what tell them apart. That matters for what to do first: the stop is losing sales today, and the empty campaign has lost nothing but a week.

A list read by hand is read on the day someone thinks to open it. Every day Goldbeater reads Google’s status and its reasons for every enabled campaign, and each campaign’s last 30 days, day by day.

It raises an enabled campaign that hasn’t ended which Google reports isn’t serving because it has no ad group or every ad group is paused, or for Performance Max, because it has no asset group or every one is paused. The finding reads low, since an empty campaign spends nothing. It offers pausing the campaign and recommends nothing: whether the campaign is meant to run is yours to say.

That is Armchairs — Phrase from the table. The finding carries no figure because there is none: the check reads Google’s own reason and counts nothing. A campaign past its end date isn’t raised, whatever it holds.

A campaign that was running is a different finding. Goldbeater raises an enabled campaign with no impressions yesterday, after impressions on each of the 14 days before, where its typical day spent $20 or more and a day with none is under 5% likely by chance across your campaigns and 30 daily checks. It reads high where the campaign converted in those days, critical where its usual 30 days also reach $2,000 or it’s your only campaign, and medium otherwise. Its advice comes from Google’s status for the campaign: an end date that passed, ads or keywords that are all paused, ads disapproved or under review.

That is Sofas — Phrase: the finding’s impressions a day and its typical day’s spend are the sums worked above, and its table is the 14 days and then yesterday. When a daily check finds a stop that wasn’t there the day before, Goldbeater emails your workspace’s owners and admins that day, which the alerts guide covers. Where every campaign stopped at once, it raises one critical finding about the account, whose advice starts at Billing.

Neither check takes the other’s campaign. A stop needs days to judge against, and Armchairs — Phrase has none. Sofas — Phrase still has its ad groups, so it isn’t empty: the same day, the check on ad groups raises all 5 of them for having no ad Google shows.

The other reasons a campaign doesn’t deliver are read the same way, every day:

• An ad group that can’t serve. An enabled Search, Standard Shopping or Display ad group, in an enabled campaign that hasn’t ended, with no enabled ad that isn’t disapproved. And a standard Search ad group with no keyword and no AI Max finding its searches. The first reads medium, and so does the second where no ad group in the campaign has a keyword. The keywords per ad group guide covers the check.
• An account budget about to stop the ads. For an account on monthly invoicing, Goldbeater reads the approved account budget in force. It raises one whose spending limit, less what’s served, would be spent within 7 days at the last 7 days’ spend, and one that ends within 7 days with no approved budget starting by then. It reads high, and critical where the ads have already stopped, and it’s emailed the day a daily check finds it. The budget pacing guide covers account budgets.
• A budget that holds a good campaign back. A campaign that loses 20% or more of its searches to its budget, more than to rank, while it is at or above its own target. The Limited by budget guide shows the finding.
• A target out of reach. A campaign with its own target CPA or ROAS, unchanged in 4 weeks, that no week of the last 13 with 5 or more conversions reached, where the target holds it back: it spent under 80% of its budget on the days it ran, or lost 20% of its searches to rank. The Target CPA guide shows the finding.
• The rest. A keyword bid under the first page estimate, a disapproved ad or keyword, a Shopping campaign with no product to show and a suspended Merchant Center account each have a finding of their own, in the keyword bidding, disapproved ads and Merchant Center guides.

The audit checklist has every other line Goldbeater reads.

Why is my Google Ads campaign not spending?

Either it can’t serve, or it serves and wins few auctions. Read its Status column first: Not eligible, Pending and Ended don’t serve. If it reads Eligible, look at a target CPA or ROAS set far from what the campaign has achieved, bids too low, keywords with low search volume and targeting too narrow. If every campaign stopped spending at once, check billing and the account’s status.

Why does my Google Ads campaign have 0 impressions?

Check the date range first: a preset such as Last 7 days leaves out today. Then read the campaign’s status. Not eligible means it has no ad groups, or all of its ad groups, ads or keywords are paused or deleted. A new campaign may still be in ad review or in its bid strategy’s learning phase, and Google says to look for a cause if there are no impressions after 3 business days.

How long does a new Google Ads campaign take to start showing ads?

It starts as soon as its first ads are approved, unless you set a later start date. Google’s ad review page says most ads are reviewed within one business day, and its page on Search campaigns that aren’t running says 24 to 48 hours, with up to 5 business days for a new account or an image or video format. Google suggests looking for a cause after 3 business days with no impressions.

My campaign is Eligible. Why isn’t it running?

Eligible means it can show ads, not that it wins auctions. Google’s pages name a target out of reach, bids too low, a budget too small, keywords with low search volume, targeting too narrow, another campaign of yours taking the same searches, and too little conversion data for automated bidding. Campaign diagnostics, on the campaign’s Overview and Insights pages, names which it found.

Does resuming a paused campaign restart its ads?

Only if nothing inside it is paused. Google says resuming a campaign doesn’t start your ads if you also paused its ad groups or keywords: each paused element has to be resumed by hand. A campaign enabled with every ad group paused reads Not eligible and shows nothing.

Why did all my Google Ads campaigns stop at once?

When every campaign stops together, look at the account. Google’s pages name a declined payment or an outstanding balance, an account budget that is spent or has ended on monthly invoicing, a suspension, a security review, which puts no notification in the account, and advertiser verification that isn’t complete.

Why are my Google Shopping ads not showing?

Start with the products. Google says to check that the Merchant Center account isn’t suspended and is linked to Google Ads, then the Products tab’s Diagnostics for whether products are ready to serve. Disapproved and out-of-stock products don’t show, product data expires 30 days after its last refresh, and a campaign may not run without shipping set up for the country it targets.