When you launch an ad on AdWords, it can be tempting to search for your own ad to see how you are doing against competitors. However, it’s not a good idea to do this, and if you give in to the temptation, it can actually hurt your campaign in the long run.
In AdWords, you have the ability to see how your ad is doing by using the Ad Preview and Diagnostics tool. Using this tool, you can preview your ad and obtain data as to why it may not be showing up; most importantly, you can get this information without causing any negative impact to your campaign. There are several reasons why you should use the Ad Preview Tool rather than searching for your own ad as a regular user. Here are 3 of the most important reasons.
Lack of Accurate Information
The point of trying to analyze your PPC campaign is to get a clear picture of how you are actually doing, and you can’t get good information just by searching. A single search for your ad won’t give you an accurate idea of how the campaign is doing. Since different advertisers are bidding on the same keywords, a search done at different times can lead to different results. Searching for your ad once, or just a few times, won’t give you the same information as analyzing data over a period of time such as a week or a month.
Repeatedly trying to search for your ad may result in you not even seeing your ad, leading you to conclude it isn’t showing up even though it may be showing up at different times.
Impact on Your Budget
The setting most often used by advertisers is standard, which means your ad budget is typically spread throughout the day. Searching for your own ad means if it is displayed to you, it might not be displayed as a legitimate prospect. In this case, you just wasted your money.
Clicking on your own ad is an even bigger waste of money and a quick way to go through your advertising budget much more quickly than you mean to.
Hurting Your Own Click Through Rate and Quality Score
The Quality Score is one of the factors that determine Ad Rank. This impacts where your ad shows up on the search results page and how much you end up paying.
The more you search for your own ad and don’t click on it, the more you are sending a message to Google that your ad is irrelevant. This can cause your click-through rate to decline and may cause your cost per click to increase because advertisers whose ads are clicked on more often pay less per click. Searching for your own ad and not clicking on it reduces the click-through rate of your quality score and ultimately costs you more.
