How to Make sure that your ads show AdWords

You made the effort to create a great ad campaign. Now let's make sure that your ads are actually reaching customers.

How you're billed

How you're billed depends on your payment settings and what you pay with. Most advertisers pay for AdWords usingautomatic payments, which means that you're charged after you have accrued advertising costs. (You can also make manual payments at any time to control your costs.)

With automatic payments, Google automatically charges your primary payment method when one of these things happens (whichever comes first):

• 30 days have passed since your last automatic charge, or
• New charges reach a preset amount, known as your billing threshold

How the billing threshold works

Your billing threshold is initially set at a certain amount. Each time that your account hits its threshold before the 30-day billing cycle has ended, your threshold increases, up to the highest threshold. Thresholds vary per account, country and currency, so make sure that you check in your account to see what your current threshold is. Note: The amount that is billed may be slightly over the threshold if your account accrues costs quickly.

You won't be emailed or notified when your billing threshold increases, so check your account to find your current threshold.

If you'd like to be charged less frequently or in larger increments, then see how to change how often you're charged.

Do it now: Find your billing threshold

To find out what your billing threshold is, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account.
2. Click on the gear icon and choose Billing.
3. Click on Billing settings.
4. Check your threshold in the "How you pay" section. Your current threshold is shown in the phrase "after [your threshold amount] is accrued or every 30 days, whichever comes first".

DO THIS NOW IN YOUR ACCOUNT

Reviewing and managing your billing information

Use the Billing pages under the gear icon as your one-stop-shop for paying for your advertising costs and managing your billing.

Here are the components that make up your Ad Rank and contribute to your ad position:

• Bid – With cost-per-click bidding (CPC), the most common bidding type, this is your maximum CPC bid, the highest amount that you're willing to pay for a click on your ad.
• Ad relevance – Measures how closely related your keyword is to your ads.
• Landing page experience – Estimates how relevant and useful your website's landing page will be to people who click on your ad.
• Expected click-through rate – Measures how likely it is that your ads will get clicked on when shown for that keyword.
• Expected impact of ad extensions and other ad formats – Takes into account the relevance, click-through rates, and the prominence of the extensions (such as sitelinks or call extensions) or formats on the search results page.

Because the auction process uses a mix of different factors to determine your ad's position, you can still win a higher position with high-quality ads, landing pages and extensions – even if your competition bids higher than you. Find out more about Ad Rank and ad position.

What you can do about your ad's position

The ad auction process repeats for every search on Google, each time with potentially different results, depending on the competition at that moment and which ad you use. So don't worry if your position on the page fluctuates – it's normal for it to vary each time.

If you want to try to boost your ad's position, then you'll need to beat your competitors by improving ad and landing page quality, adjusting your bid amounts or adding new ad extensions (or improving the ones that you have).