Google is limiting my impressions! Why? (Advanced Adwords question)

Hi Connor,

There are a number of reasons you may not be getting more impressions.

Your keyword could have competitors bidding higher than you are, particularly for some of the long tail versions that include your keyword as part of the phrase: "buy mens wallets online" or "sale on mens wallets". While your bid may be high enough for your root phrase you could be seriously outbid by competitors for phrases that include your less targeted root keyword. This effect is magnified when you add in Quality Score factors.

The solution is to find as many of those longer keyword phrases as possible and create ad groups for each, or just bid much more aggressively.

Another likely cause for you lower than expected impressions is your daily budget. Let's do the math: 100,000 searches X 8% CTR = 8000 clicks. That's an average of 267 clicks per day. Since search volume varies greatly on a day by day basis, as well as seasonal variations, you could have a potential of more than a thousand clicks in a single day. 1000 clicks X CPC of $1.50 = $1500: Your daily budget of $200 won't cover it, so you ads will definitely be throttled.

The solution is to up your daily budget to at least triple the expected average to avoid getting clipped on heavy search days. Ideally you should make your daily budget way higher so you can take advantage of spikes in searches and use you bid levels to control your spend over the period of a month.