Fix issues with your Dynamic Search Ads

Your Dynamic Ad Target status lets you know whether your targets are eligible to serve or not. If your Dynamic Ad Targets are not 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.

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 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 is 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 is not setup) or if the Dynamic Ad Group setup has not been completed.
Next Steps: Review the account and Dynamic Ad Group to confirm they are setup 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 are not 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 webpages 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. If your website is blocking GoogleBot but isn’t blocking AdsBot, then you can use URL based targeting either through URL equals or Page Feeds because these use AdsBot crawlers. See status solutions for “Disapproved: Destination not crawlable” below for more information.

Rarely Shown: Few matching queries

Dynamic Search Ads automatically generates targets for your ad to serve on by reviewing the content on your webpage 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 webpages that have relevant text and are well optimized for webpage crawlers. Formats such as PDFs or webpages 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 optimize your webpage for Dynamic Search Ads:

  • Ensure people can tell at a glance what your page is about. This will help webpage crawlers identify what is 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 Optimization 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 is the most relevant to the user’s search query.
Next Steps: No action required. If you want a webpage to match to a specific target use negative ad targets to control which landing pages each ad target matches to.

Eligible (Limited): All pages blocked

All the targeted URLs are ineligible to serve because they are 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 webpage, this will prevent your Dynamic Ad Targets from serving.
Next Steps: Review your negative Dynamic Ad Targets to see if any of them overlap with your targets. You can review the ”Website coverage” column to see 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 webpage titles are too short or the text is unclear.
Next Steps: Review your webpage titles and make sure they are clear and descriptive. Webpage titles have the strongest influence on the generated headline.
Check out these tips to make it easier for Google to use your webpage 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 URL Equals.

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 URL requirements.

Disapproved: Destination not crawlable

Dynamic Search Ads rely on Google’s webpage crawlers to collect data from the website to generate the website headline and targets. If the webpage you are targeting with URL_EQUALS cannot be crawled, then webpages cannot be used with Dynamic Search Ads. Learn more about common product crawl issues.
Next 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 Optimization Starter Guide.

Disapproved: Destination mismatch

The URL_EQUALS target does not 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 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

To view the Page feed statuses:

  1. Click on the Tools icon Google Ads | tools [Icon] .
  2. Click on Business data.
  3. Click on the feed you’d like to view the statuses for.
  4. 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: Follow directions here 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 webpage than the one specified. The redirect URL is within the same domain so it is eligible to serve.

Next Steps: URLs that redirect within the same domain are eligible to serve. However, you should make sure that you are targeting the page you intend to serve ads on.

Review the page feed URL and make sure that you are 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.

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 will not 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 URL 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 labeled as "Disapproved."
Next Steps: Review the duplicate URL that is approved and make sure 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 webpage crawlers to collect data from the website to generate the website headline and targets. If the webpage cannot be crawled, then the webpage won’t work with Dynamic Search Ads. Learn more about common product crawl issues.
Next 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 Optimization 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 have 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.

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