How to check your brand search without skewing your adsHow to check your brand search without skewing your ads

At Yourbrand, four people search the brand name most mornings to see that all is well. One of them notices that the brand's own ad has stopped appearing for her, and raises the alarm. The campaign is fine. Google has simply stopped showing her an ad she keeps seeing and never clicks.

Checking your own brand search by hand feels like the most direct test there is. It's also the one most likely to mislead you. This guide explains what repeated searching does, how Google's Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool avoids it, and how to build a check that sees more than one desk at one hour.

What a search by hand does

It changes what you see. Google says that if you keep searching for your own ad without clicking it, you may stop seeing it, because it stops showing ads it thinks you aren't interested in. So a search that's been run every morning for a month is a poor test of what a new visitor sees.

It adds impressions. Every search that shows an ad counts as an impression for that advertiser, yours included. A team checking a brand dozens of times a day adds impressions that will never be clicks.

It sees one place. Google places a searcher mainly by IP address, and every advertiser chooses where its ads show. Location targeting can leave out a city or a postcode district, and IP exclusions can leave out up to 500 addresses per campaign, enough for an office's public address. A results page that's clear from your desk can be a hole in the map.

It sees one device and one moment. A campaign can run on phones only, and an ad schedule can keep it to the evening. Your desk at ten in the morning is one slice of the auction.

Never click to check

Clicking an ad you don't recognise, to see where it goes, feels like investigation. It isn't. The click is charged to the advertiser unless Google judges it invalid. Under parallel tracking your browser goes straight to the final URL while the tracking runs in the background, so the address bar won't show you any network in between. And if the click is credited, it can leave an affiliate's referral in your browser, so a later order from that computer earns commission. A test click shows how one server treated your browser, once.

Ad Preview and Diagnosis

Ad Preview and Diagnosis is a tool inside Google Ads, in the Tools menu under Troubleshooting. Google's help says it gives results like a Google search of your own while avoiding ad impressions, and one of its pages puts it as “the exact same results as a Google search without accumulating any impressions”. You type a search, set the location, the language and the device, select Preview, and get the page, other advertisers' ads included.

• Location: where the search comes from. Try several: a page in Manchester can differ from one in London.
• Language: English for UK searches.
• Device: computers, mobile phones and tablets. A phone-only campaign never appears on the office computer.
• Diagnosis: for your own ads, whether one is eligible to show for that search, highlighted in green on the first page, and if it isn't, the reasons the tool gives.
• Share this search: a link to the same search and settings, to bookmark or send to a colleague.

Google says that if your ad is targeted to a certain language, location or device, you need to set those to preview it. That's the tool's point: it shows the page for the place and device you chose, not for your desk.

How to check, step by step

1. Agree as a team to stop routine searches by hand. One person checks, using the tool, on a set day and time.
2. Open Ad Preview and Diagnosis in Google Ads. Set the location to the United Kingdom, the language to English and the device to mobile.
3. Type your bare brand name, then “yourbrand discount code”, “yourbrand voucher code” and “yourbrand promo code”. Screenshot each page.
4. Change the location to two or three cities you sell into, then the device to computer, and repeat.
5. For each ad you don't recognise, note the headline, description, display URL and position, and search its advertiser in the Ads Transparency Center.
6. For your own ad, read the diagnosis wherever it isn't showing, and fix what's yours to fix before looking at anyone else.
7. Look at your brand campaign's Auction insights by device and by day of week, and its Avg. CPC by Hour of day. Those cover the hours the tool can't.
8. Keep every screenshot with the date, time, location, device and search, in one place your network can be sent. Share this search gives a link to the same search.

The Auction insights step matters because the tool only shows now. A price that climbs every evening, with nothing changed in your account, says someone is on your name at night. The Auction insights guide reads those columns.

The ordinary explanations

When your own ad doesn't show on your name, or an ad shows for a colleague and not for you, the cause is usually ordinary.

• Your own budget ran out for the day, or your own schedule has the campaign off at this hour.
• Your own campaign excludes your office: an IP exclusion added to keep staff clicks out, or targeting that leaves out your area.
• You've searched so often that Google has stopped showing you the ad.
• The ad is under review, disapproved or limited, which the diagnosis will say.
• Your Ad Rank on this search was too low: a keyword's match type changed, or a new bidder outranked you.
• The other advertiser targets places, devices or hours you didn't check, for an ordinary reason such as a delivery area or a mobile-only offer.

Not seeing an ad from your office proves nothing by itself. Seeing it from London proves only that it showed there, then. Not where you are goes deeper into location and IP settings, and Out of hours into schedules.