How PPC works is that the advertisers have to setup an account with Google and/or Yahoo first. Once the accounts are ready, the advertisers then can start building up their Campaigns, AdGroups, Ads, keywords, and so on. The account managers at Google and Yahoo then will look after the accounts and make sure everything works (no violations of guidelines, ads are showing up, etc).

At this point, a lot of advertisers will assume that everything is done, and they can just sit at home waiting to count their cash. Well, that maybe the case in fairytale wonderlands, but definitely not in the world we live in. The reality is, a lot of times the teams at Google and Yahoo get so overwhelmed by their work and they lost tracks of what have been done and what hasn’t, resulting in a lot of updates being not approved (because no one had reviewed them).

This is more of a problem with Google than with Yahoo. With Yahoo’s system, if the newly submitted updates are still under review, you can see their status being “editorial pending". If it’s been ten days since you first submitted your update and the status is still “editorial pending", you know someone has forgotten to do their job. Just send an email to your account manager at Yahoo and state what the problem is and the problem should be sorted out in a day or two.

Google is somewhat different. Once you’ve submitted an update to Google, you will immediately see its status being “active", same as all the existing ads, keywords, ad groups you have. So if after ten days and you are still getting no impressions from the new update, and you intuitively check to see if the update is actually running, and when all you can see is it being “active", you will just think “Oh, I guess no one has searched for it yet", when in fact, Google’s just forgot to review them.

So monitor your accounts frequently, and the moment you sense something’s weird, fire an email to your account manager. Don’t be shy to send multiple emails in a day if that’s what it takes to get things fixed.