Once you’ve developed a paid advertising strategy and your new ads are live, there’s nothing more exciting than seeing them in action.

But, you might want to think twice before you start Googling the keywords and phrases you’ve chosen for those ads.

Searching for your business’s ads can hurt your campaigns, and there are plenty of ways to see your ad performance without searching!

Let's review the negatives that come along with searching for your own ads and talk about how to get around that desire to perform a Google search every time you want to see how your ads look in action.

Searching For Your Ads Means Inaccurate Performance

There are two ways that searching for your ads can give you an inaccurate view of your performance.

1. Google will think your ad is low-quality, and this can raise your ad costs.

The more you search for your business’s ads, the more impressions you’ll rack up. This isn’t too bad if you’re only searching once or twice, but searching over and over again will have a negative effect on your campaign.

Here’s how it works:

• Your ad continues to get more and more impressions
• You don’t click the ad
• Google starts to believe your ad isn’t relevant to your search terms or that your ad is of low quality

This can raise your ad’s cost-per-click over time, which is the exact opposite of what we’re trying to do! We continually optimize clients’ ads to improve performance and maximize your budget.

The last thing you want is for your campaign to become less efficient because of something you can control.

2. You’ll get an inaccurate view of the number of people searching for your products/services, leading to unnecessary or harmful ad optimizations.

Searching for yourself will also give your campaign manager/strategist an inaccurate view of how many people are searching for your services.

Let’s say you search for yourself three times a day (at different times) every day. That means you account for 84-93 searches each month.

To our marketing strategists, that number of searches per month tells us that your audience is larger than it actually is. This will lead to campaign enhancements and optimizations that are either unnecessary or detrimental.

What to Do if You Absolutely Have to See Your Ads

Let’s say you just can’t feel comfortable about having a campaign running unless you see your ads in action. We get it. It’s reassuring to see that the ads are running and know exactly how they look in searches.

Luckily, Google has provided a few ways to see if your ads are showing without sacrificing your campaign data.

1. First, there is the impression count within your campaign data. Your impression count increases every time a consumer sees your ad. If you want to be sure your ad is showing up, just keep an eye on your impressions.
2. Second, Google offers a tool called Ad Preview and Diagnosis, which allows you to conduct your own searches without affecting your campaign data.
3. Third, if you are already a RevLocal paid advertising client, Reveal, our analytics platform, will tell you if your ads are enabled or paused! You can also see your ads and keywords within the platform. If you’re not sure where to look, your strategist can help.

Final Thoughts

Searching for your ads doesn’t help your campaign (and can actually hurt it in the long run), but that doesn’t mean you can’t see them. Utilize the tools available to you so you can see your ads and make the right decisions for your campaign.