Are Your Google Ads Running? How to Check in 30 Seconds
Table of contents
You typed your own business name into Google, scrolled the results, and your ad was nowhere to be seen. Stop searching. Two columns inside Google Ads answer the question in about thirty seconds, and searching for yourself gives a misleading answer while costing you a little each time.
How to tell in thirty seconds
Read the campaign status
Open the Campaigns view and look at the Status column. The quoted wording comes from Google’s campaign status definitions.
| Status | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Eligible | “Your campaign is active and can show ads.” | Nothing at campaign level. Check the ad status and impressions next. |
| Limited by budget | Running, but it stops once the daily budget is spent and could get more traffic with more budget. | Raise the budget, or cut the number of campaigns sharing it. |
| Eligible (limited) | “Your campaign is active, but showing ads only occasionally due to budget constraints or a limited bid strategy.” | Hover the status to see which limit applies, then loosen it. |
| Pending | “Your campaign is inactive but scheduled to begin at a future date.” | Change the start date if you meant it to run now. |
| Paused | You paused it, so ads don’t show or build up new costs until it is resumed. | Enable it. |
| Removed | You removed it, which permanently deletes the campaign. | Build a new campaign or copy the old one. |
| Ended | “Your campaign is inactive because it’s past its scheduled end date.” | Extend or clear the end date in settings. |
| Not eligible | No ad groups, or every ad group, ad or keyword beneath it is paused or deleted. | Enable or add at least one ad group with a live ad and keywords. |
Paused or Pending turns up more often than you would expect when someone asks this question, and the problem is solved before they get any further.
Read the ad status
A live campaign with a dead ad still shows nothing. Drop into the Ads view and check that column too. Google’s ad status help page defines them this way:
- Eligible means the ad “complies with the Google Ads policies, so it can be shown to all audiences”.
- Under review means Google has not finished checking it yet.
- Disapproved means the ad “cannot run because its content or its destination violates Google Ads policy”.
- Not eligible means something above it is paused, removed, ended, pending or incomplete.
Check impressions over the last seven days
Statuses tell you what should be happening. Impressions tell you what did.
Set the date range to the last 7 days and look at the Impressions column. Any number above zero means your ads have served. Zero impressions with an Eligible status means something else is in the way, and the checklist further down covers what.
Why searching for your own ad fails
You are not the customer Google is matching
Ads are served on location, device, time, language and audience signals, none of which describe you at your desk. Missing your ad on your own screen says very little about whether a customer twenty kilometres away sees it.
Repeated checking makes it worse. Google’s own guide to finding your ads warns that if you keep looking for your ad and never click it, “you might stop seeing it entirely”, because the system stops showing you ads it thinks you aren’t interested in.
Every search you make costs you a little
Searching for your own ad triggers an impression, and you won’t click your own ad afterwards.
Do that often enough and you pile up impressions without clicks, which Google says can lower your click-through rate and stop the ad appearing as often as it should. Click-through rate feeds the quality signals that decide what you pay, so obsessive checking nudges your costs up. The effect is small per search and entirely avoidable.
Use the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool
Google built a tool for exactly this job. According to Google’s Ad Preview and Diagnosis help page, it shows why an ad might not be appearing and a preview of how it looks on the results page, and it “avoids accumulating ad impressions and impacting your performance statistics”.
You will find it under Tools, then Troubleshooting, then Ad preview and diagnosis. Enter the keyword you want to check, then change the settings along the top (location, language and device) to match a real customer rather than yourself.
You get one of two useful answers. Either your ad appears in the preview, or the tool tells you why it is not showing for that specific search, which is far more useful than an empty results page.
Set the location to a suburb you target. Checking a Brisbane campaign while sitting in Melbourne will show you nothing, and that is the tool working correctly. Keywords with very little search history may not produce a preview at all.
Troubleshooting checklist when nothing is showing
Work down this list in order. Each item matches a status or symptom from the checks above.
- Campaign Paused, Pending, Ended or Removed? Fix the status or dates first. Nothing below matters until the campaign reads Eligible.
- Ad under review? Google reviews most ads within one business day, though more complex reviews can take longer, and a brand new account or unusual industry often sits here longer. Wait a full business day, and avoid editing the ad meanwhile, since an edited ad goes back for review.
- Ad disapproved? Hover the status to see the specific policy. The usual causes are destination problems rather than ad copy: a page that will not load, an ad that promises something the page doesn’t deliver, or missing business information. For Shopping campaigns the disapproval usually sits in Merchant Center rather than Google Ads, which is why Shopping problems are diagnosed in the product feed rather than the campaign.
- Limited by budget? Your ads are running, just not all day. Google spends the daily budget and then stops showing ads, so an afternoon check can easily find nothing. When it is chronic, a common self-inflicted cause is a modest budget spread across several campaigns, and getting more from the same spend usually means consolidating rather than adding.
- Eligible but zero impressions? This is the confusing one. An ad can be fully approved and still never appear, because eligibility and competitiveness are separate things. Usually your Ad Rank is not clearing the minimum threshold for the positions on offer, which is explained in how Google decides which ads show and where. The fix is normally a higher bid or a more relevant ad and landing page. Very low search volume on narrow keywords causes it too.
- Brand new or freshly approved? Approved ads often start serving within hours, but a new campaign can take two to three days to serve consistently, because approval makes an ad eligible without guaranteeing it wins auctions. Automated bidding also needs conversion data before it settles, which is one of the things worth having ready before you start.
- Tempted to pause and restart? Pausing keeps the campaign’s history, but switching on and off repeatedly gives automated bidding less to learn from. Leave it running while you diagnose.
Checking a rival’s ads is a different job, covered in how to see which Google Ads a competitor runs.
Still stuck after the whole list? That is where an outside look saves time, and it is the first thing we check in a Google Ads account review.
Vignesh runs paid media, social and design at Enigma Scale. He has managed spend across every major ad platform and rebuilt the sites those clicks land on, which is usually where the real problem turns out to be.
More from Vignesh →