AdWords Ad Preview Tool and How To Use It

You’ve created your first AdWords campaign and now you cant wait for first clicks to begin. But You do not want only that, you want to see how these ads appear on Google search engine. Therefore, you are opening a new tab in your browser and you type one of the keywords you are targeting in your AdWords campaign. You see your ad among  other ads and you are happy.

However, you see that your ad is in fourth position and you wonder will it show in a better position so you click a few more times on search. After a few times your ad no longer appears among other ads.

This is normal because most likely you have a limited daily budget, so the system attempts to allocate the budget throughout the whole day. To be able to accomplish that, the system does not show your ad for every query. After an hour or two you again try to do a search on Google to check whether your ad is running. And you are doing this all day.

What would you say if I told you that you are doing only damage to your campaign by doing this? Every time you enter one of your targeted keywords in search engine you are increasing the number of impressions (for that keyword, ad, campaign).

You are also influencing CTR (click thru rate) which is declining. And, very very simply put, it is one of the metrics that system uses in determining prices for clicks on your ad. Yes, you are raising your CPCs (cost per click).

To avoid any influence in this way we suggest to use very simple tool. You can get to it thru your adwords account. Just click on Tools tab then choose “ad preview and diagnosis”

 

AD Preview Tool

 

If you are not logged in AdWords campaign then link to this tool is located here (at the moment the old layout is still active on this type of keyword planner). When you open the link you will see that you have the possibility of several choices.

Using this tool you can see how the ads look like (and what ads are displayed) in specific countries (domains). Every country has its own domain (UK – co.uk, Croatia – hr, Germany – de…) so if you are targeting some foreign country (with your ads) you need to choose the correct domain. But, first thing first.

The first option is to enter location we wish to test. You can enter name of some country or name of some city. All you need to to do is to click on selected location. It will show you current targeted location with option to enter new location. To enter new location just star to write the name of location in empty bar below currently targeted location.

In picture below we started to write “berlin” and the system offered to chose that location. But, we shall stay with London.

After this you can choose language of users in the targeted location. In this example we are targeting London so it is logical that we shall select “english” as language. All you need to do is again just click on currently selected language and choose language that you are interested in.

 

This can be very helpful – because, what if you are trying to sell London sight-seeing tours to , let us say, german tourists? Then you will choose “german” language for targeting german-speaking tourists in London.

Next thing to choose to test is device targeting. This is simply straightforward – just choose the device type to test your ads on different devices.

Ad Preview tool is the only tool that shows you the real SERP results! Click To Tweet

Again, just click on currently selected device and you will see 3 possibilities. These are: Desktop, Mobile devices, Tablets.

 

Now, only thing left to choose is Google domain. Every country has its own domain. If you do not know what domain is for certain country – try here

In this example we are targeting London which is in United Kingdom – therefore we are choosing co.uk domain.

The only thing left now is to type the word or phrase you want to test and click on “preview”. We’ll get a new window where we will see the ads that correspond to the parameters that have been entered: keyword, domain name, language, country/location and device.

Well, this is pretty easy, right? So, if you need to see how your ads are “looking” for certain keywords and what your competition is – use this ad preview tool.