Your dynamic ad target status lets you know whether your targets are eligible to serve or not. If your dynamic ad targets aren't serving, you can use the status to figure out the nature of the problem.
These statuses are listed in the 'Dynamic ad targets' section of the page menu in Google Ads. This article explains what the different statuses mean and how to resolve them.
Expand all
Types of dynamic search ad statuses
Below are the different status types:
| Status type |
Examples: |
| Statuses that you control |
Campaign paused
Removed
|
| Statuses related to system processing |
Pending |
| Statuses that require you to make a change |
Below first page bid
Destination not working
No matching landing pages
No matching queries
All pages blocked
Destination not crawlable
Destination mismatch
No headline generated
|
| Statuses that are impacted on by other factors |
Overlapping target |
What they mean and what to do about them
The dynamic ad target status tells you whether your target is eligible to serve ads to customers. In general, your target will be in one of three states:
- Showing ads
- Not showing ads because you paused or removed a keyword, ad group or campaign
- Not showing ads because there's an issue with your target, website or setup
Here are the different types of Dynamic Ad Target statuses, what they mean and how to respond to them:
Below first page bid
Your dynamic ad target isn't performing well because its bid is too low to show ads on the first page of search results consistently.
Next steps: Leverage Smart Bidding with Dynamic Search Ads to benefit from 'auction-time bidding'. Learn more About Smart Bidding.
Eligible: Pending
It takes up to 24 hours after you set up your first dynamic ad group for it to begin serving ads.
This status also shows if the account is ineligible to serve (for example, if billing isn't setup) or if the dynamic ad group setup hasn't been completed.
Next steps: Review the account and dynamic ad group to confirm that they're set up correctly and eligible to serve. After you’ve confirmed this, wait 24 hours.
Eligible (Limited): No matching landing pages
This means that Google Ads isn’t finding any eligible pages that match with the dynamic ad target. There are a variety of reasons that this could happen, including issues with how the target is set up, incompatible campaign settings, or the pages aren't crawlable.
Next steps: Check your setup and targets. Some things to look for:
- Make sure that the Dynamic Ad Target is correct and matches your target pages. For example, if the Dynamic Ad Target is a "URL contains" target, confirm that the targeted URLs contain the text in the target and the target is spelled correctly.
- Ensure that the domain and campaign language settings are correct and match. For example, a Dynamic Ad Target can’t serve if all of your web pages are in French but the language targeted in your Dynamic Search Ads settings is German.
- Does your website block Google crawlers from indexing URLs? For example, if your website uses robots.txt to prevent Googlebot from crawling your pages, then the target may be ineligible to serve. Check status solutions for 'Disapproved: Destination not crawlable' below for more information.
Rarely Shown: Few matching queries
Dynamic Search Ads, using Google AI, generates targets for your ad to serve on by reviewing the content on your web page to find relevant terms and themes. This status means that Google Ads is unable to identify many searches to serve ads on from your targeted pages, so the target may not serve or it may have low volume. Dynamic Search Ads work well with web pages that have relevant text and are well optimised for web page crawlers. Formats such as PDFs or web pages that have a lot of images and minimal text can be hard for Dynamic Search Ads to identify queries to serve on.
Next Steps: Here are some tips to optimise your web page for Dynamic Search Ads:
- Ensure that people can tell at a glance what your page is about. This will help web page crawlers identify what's on your page, and make it easier for users to navigate on your website.
- Break down categories where relevant. That will improve user navigation and allow Dynamic Search Ads to generate categories for you to target.
- Mention all relevant content on your pages. This will improve user navigation and help you to get more traffic in each category
You can learn more about how to make your website accessible to our crawlers in the Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide.
Eligible (limited): Overlapping target
The target may not serve or may have limited traffic due to an overlapping target. When multiple targets are eligible to match to a query, Dynamic search ads prefers to serve the landing page that's the most relevant to the user’s search query.
Next Steps: No action required. If you want a web page to match to a specific target use negative ad targets to control which landing pages that each ad target matches to.
Eligible (limited): All pages blocked
All the targeted URLs are ineligible to serve because they're blocked by negative Dynamic Ad Targets.
For example, if you add a PAGE_CONTENT exclusion for 'out of stock', but 'out of stock' is in the text on every web page, this will prevent your dynamic ad targets from serving.
Next steps: Review your negative dynamic ad targets to check if any of them overlap with your targets. You can review the 'Website coverage' column to determine the percentage of pages that are covered by a negative dynamic ad target.
Rarely shown: No headline generated
Dynamic Search ads dynamically generates headlines for your creatives. In some cases, Dynamic Search Ads is unable to do this. This could be because your web page titles are too short or the text is unclear.
Next Steps: Review your webpage titles and make sure that they are clear and descriptive. Web page titles have the strongest influence on the generated headline.
Check out
these tips to make it easier for Google to use your web page to generate Dynamic Search Ad headlines.
Statuses Available for URL Equals Dynamic Ad Targets
The URL Equals dynamic ad target allows you to target one URL at a time. Learn more About targets for Dynamic Search Ads
Disapproved: Destination not working
The URL_EQUALS target URL is invalid.
Next steps: Check the URL to make sure that it’s valid and loads in a browser. Learn more about
Destination requirements
Disapproved: Destination not crawlable
Dynamic Search Ads rely on
Google’s web page crawlers to collect data from the website to generate the website headline and targets. If the web page that you're targeting with URL_EQUALS can't be crawled, then web pages can't be used with Dynamic Search Ads. Learn more about common
Product crawl issuesNext Steps: GoogleBot and AdsBot supply Google Ads with the information that Dynamic Search Ads use. Your webmaster can ensure that your webpages aren’t blocking these crawlers and improve the information available to them by following this
Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide.
Disapproved: Destination mismatch
The URL_EQUALS target doesn't allow cross domain redirects. For example, if your URL example.com redirects to example.jp, this URL would be ineligible for dynamic search ads.
Next Steps: Make sure that you are targeting the final URL after all redirects with URL_EQUALS Dynamic Ad Targets.
For example, if you want to serve an ad for https://example.com/home.html, enter exactly that in your Dynamic Ad Target and put any tracking information in the tracking parameters part of your creatives or settings.
Dynamic Search Ad Page feed statuses
Note: The instructions below are part of the new design for the Google Ads user experience. To use the previous design, click the 'Appearance' icon and select
Use previous design. If you're using the previous version of Google Ads, review the
Quick reference map or use the search bar in the top navigation panel of Google Ads to find the page you’re searching for.
Note: There is a limit of 100 page feeds per account.
To view the page feed statuses:
- In your Google Ads account, click the Tools icon
- Click Business data.
- Click on the feed you’d like to view the statuses for.
- The information will be listed under the 'Status' column.
These are the different types of page feed entry statuses, what they mean and how to respond to them:
Approved
Page Feed URLs are eligible to serve with a Dynamic Ad Target.
Next steps: Use the directions for targeting with page feeds to select the targeting source in the campaign containing your dynamic ad group. This will allow you to target URLs from your page feed with a dynamic ad target.
Approved (limited)
The URL directs to a different web page from the one specified. The redirect URL is within the same domain so it's eligible to serve.
Next Steps: URLs that redirect within the same domain are eligible to serve. However, you should make sure that you're targeting the page that you intend to serve ads on.
Review the page feed URL and make sure that you're targeting the final URL after all redirects. The redirect URL should be displayed if you hover over the status.
You should also make sure that you’ve put any tracking information in the tracking parameters section of your ads or settings.
You may have this status because you're targeting a topic that requires a certificate, use the 'Policy details' column on the Ads & assets page in your Google Ads account to troubleshoot. Learn how to Check the review status of an ad or asset
Disapproved: Destination mismatch
Dynamic Search Ads don’t allow cross-domain redirects. For example, if the page feed URL is example.com, but the URL redirects to example1.com, then the URL won't be eligible to serve.
Next steps: Make sure that the final URL has the same domain as the URL specified in the page feed.
Disapproved: Destination not working
The targeted URL is invalid.
Next steps: Check the URL to make sure that it’s valid and loads in a browser. Learn more about
Destination requirements
Disapproved: Duplicate URL
If there are identical URLs in a page feed, only the URL most recently added to the feed is eligible to serve. All other duplicate URLs will be labelled as "Disapproved".
Next Steps: Review the duplicate URL that's approved and make sure that the correct labels are associated with it.
You should also remove disapproved duplicate URLs to make your feed easier to manage.
Disapproved: Not crawlable
Dynamic Search Ads rely on
Google’s web page crawlers to collect data from the website to generate the website headline and targets. If the web page can't be crawled, then the web page won’t work with Dynamic Search Ads. Learn more about
Product crawl issuesNext Steps: GoogleBot and AdsBot supply Google Ads with the information that Dynamic Search Ads use. Your webmaster can ensure that your web pages aren’t blocking these crawlers and improve the information available to them by following this
Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide.
Under review
It typically takes up to 24 hours to crawl all of the pages in a page feed after you create or modify it. It may take longer if a page feed is very large.
Next Steps: This status shows if you modify the page feed by adding a URL, edit a URL or edit a custom labels. Most URLs should be crawled within 24 hours after making a change to the feed.
If you're blocking Google Ads from crawling your content, you might be limiting efficient crawls. This is especially likely if you've uploaded or edited a large number of page feed entries at one time. You can
check and adjust the crawl rate in Search Console.
If your website doesn’t have sufficient crawl capacity, it may take significantly longer to finish crawling all of the pages in the page feed.
Note: Make sure to remove invalid URLs from the feed.
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