Why Your Google Ads Aren't Showing (And What to Do About It)
- David
- Feb 3
- 6 min read
If your Google Ads aren't showing, or they're buried so far down the page they might as well not exist, you're not alone. Between AI Overviews pushing results around, vehicle ads shifting positions, and PMAX campaigns behaving unpredictably, there's more working against visibility in 2026 than ever before.
This isn't a Google Ads 101 walkthrough. We have that covered here. In this post, we'll get into what actually causes ads to lose visibility—specifically for vehicle ads—and what levers you have to fix it.
By the way, we originally broke this down in a video with our team. See it below.
The Basics: Common Technical Issues That Block Ads
Before getting into the nuanced stuff, it's worth ruling out the obvious. These are the first things to check when your ads aren't showing:
Campaign is paused
This is simple, but it happens. So make sure your campaign is running.
Ad disapprovals
Check for policy violations at the ad or asset level.
Billing issues
Expired credit card, failed payment, or a billing threshold you didn't notice.
Google Merchant Center Errors
Feed issues, product disapprovals, or account-level flags.
Verification deadlines
If you see a banner warning that your ads will stop showing by a certain date, Google isn't bluffing. They will shut off delivery. So make sure you have that covered. Verification requirements can vary from a quick form to multiple documents. Whatever the case may be, just don't ignore it.
Learning phase – New campaigns (especially on newer accounts) need time. We've seen cases where bid strategies need to be adjusted before ads stabilize.
Low-search-volume keywords – If a keyword is flagged as low search volume, it won't trigger ads consistently.
Conflicting negative keywords – A negative keyword blocking your target terms will quietly kill visibility.
None of these is groundbreaking, but they're easy to overlook and worth eliminating before assuming something more complicated is wrong.
Why Vehicle Ads Appear at the Bottom Instead of the Top
If your ads aren't showing at all, start with the basics in the previous section—paused campaigns, disapprovals, billing, verification. But if your ads are technically running and you still can't find them, the issue is usually placement: they're buried at the end of the vehicle ad carousel, where users have to click the arrow three times to see them.
One of the biggest factors is the mismatch between your location targeting radius and your daily budget.
If you're running a $20/day budget on a 50-mile radius in a competitive metro, your ads will likely land at the bottom of the pack. You're spreading too little money across too much ground.
Competition plays a role, too.
If you're the only dealer running vehicle ads in a given area, you'll still show up regardless of budget. But that's rarely the case. In most metros, you're competing against multiple dealers bidding on the same inventory and geography.
The other issue is time-of-day visibility. With a tight budget and a wide radius, your ads may show in the morning but lose visibility entirely by afternoon. Google spends your budget early, and once it's gone, so is your placement.
High Impression Share Doesn't Always Mean Visibility
You might even have a 95% impression share and still be buried.
Here's why that happens: Google counts an impression any time your ad loads in the vehicle ad carousel, even if it's in the sixth or seventh position. A user would have to click the right arrow three times to see it, but Google still logs it as an impression.
We saw this play out heavily with Stellantis dealers when co-op money flooded into vehicle ads. Budgets went up across the board, saturation increased, and suddenly everyone had high impression share, but most were fighting for the last few carousel slots. The metric looked healthy. The actual placement didn't.
The point is, impression share tells you whether your ads are loading. It doesn't tell you whether anyone's actually seeing them.
How Much Should You Actually Spend on Vehicle Ads?
There's no universal answer, but there are useful patterns, especially if you're in a competitive metro.
For a major metropolitan area with reasonable competition, expect to spend around $40–50/day to saturate a 15–25 mile radius. At that level, you're looking at roughly 85–97% impression share. Go smaller—say $20/day on a 50-mile radius—and you'll be spread too thin, showing at the bottom of the carousel or dropping off entirely by midday.
But what happens if you double the budget?
More money doesn't automatically mean more visibility or better results. If you jump straight to $80–90/day without data to justify it, a few things happen: your average CPC and CPA rise, and you set an inflated benchmark that Google will expect going forward. If you later try to scale back, you may run out of budget early in the day because Google has learned to spend at a higher rate.
You can also end up overspending against competitors who didn't need to be outspent. A dealer running $10–20/day on an F-150 campaign can be beaten with $50. You don't need $100.
For reference, the average CPC for a vehicle ad in a major metro (something competitive like an F-150) should be around $1 or below. Once you're consistently hitting $2–3+, you're into diminishing returns. We've seen accounts spending $8–13 per click, and at that point, lead quality has to be exceptional to justify it.
Daily Budget | Radius | Expected Impression Share | What Happens |
~$20 | 50 miles | Low | Budget spread thin; ads at the bottom or gone by midday |
$40–50 | 15–25 miles | 85–97% | Recommended baseline for major metros |
$80–90+ | 15–25 miles | Marginal gains | CPC/CPA rise; sets inflated cost benchmark |
For the best results, start at a moderate budget, let the data come in, then scale based on what you're seeing.
Why PMAX Campaigns Go Broad—and How to Catch It
If you're spending aggressively on vehicle ads and the search volume for your target model isn't there, Google will start going broad. Sometimes very broad.
Here's what that looks like: you set up a campaign for a Nissan Rogue, and when you check the search terms report, you see "Nissan Rogue," "2024 Nissan Rogue," "2025 Nissan Rogue"—but also "Nissan Pathfinder" and just "Nissan." Google's trying to spend your budget, and if it can't find enough Rogue searches, it'll expand to adjacent terms.
This is where vehicle ads can quietly become a bottomless pit.
The good news is you can now see search terms inside PMAX and vehicle ad campaigns, and you can add negative keywords. If you're not checking weekly—ideally twice a week—you're probably letting irrelevant traffic slip through.
That said, not everyone treats this the same way. Some dealers are fine with branded terms showing up across model campaigns. If you want to own every Nissan search and point it to your Rogues, that's a valid strategy. But other dealers get frustrated when someone searches "Nissan Armada" and a Kicks shows up.
There's no single right answer. Google's position is that PMAX is designed to find the right customers, so less control might be fine. But if you're spending significant budget and not watching where it goes, you're trusting the algorithm more than you probably should.
How to Set Up Vehicle Ad Campaigns the Right Way
If you're launching vehicle ad campaigns for the first time or resetting an underperforming account, how you start matters more than you'd think.
Google learns from your account history. If you come out of the gate spending aggressively and your average cost per click lands at $8–10, that becomes the benchmark. Future campaigns will inherit that expectation. If you try to scale back later, Google may burn through your budget early in the day because it's learned to spend at that rate. Training the algorithm with inflated costs is hard to undo.
Instead, start with a moderate budget, even if you have more to spend. Let the data come in, analyze what's working, then scale accordingly.
Before you launch, get clear on a few things:
Priority models. Usually, this is whatever you have the most of in stock. Don't spread your budget evenly across everything. Focus where you have depth.
Saturation radius. Your targeting radius needs to match your budget. A $40–50/day budget can saturate 15–25 miles in a major metro. Stretch that to 50 miles on the same budget, and you'll be invisible by noon.
Primary conversions. What you set as a primary conversion affects how Google optimizes, and that, in turn, affects visibility. Form submits as your only primary conversion may improve lead quality, but it can also limit how much Google shows your ads. Some dealers prioritize saturation, some prioritize conversions, and some try to balance both. It's hard to have everything.
If you have access to market data, registration data, zip code performance, and competitor activity, use it to identify where you're losing share and where there's opportunity. That helps you define not just how much to spend, but where.
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