Why are my keywords getting low impressions?

Low impressions in Google Ads: what it actually means (and what it doesn’t)

When someone says “my keywords are getting low impressions,” I first separate two very different scenarios: your keywords aren’t eligible to enter many auctions, or they’re eligible but losing auctions. In the first case, your ads can’t show even if someone searches. In the second case, your ads could show, but your Ad Rank and/or budget (and sometimes targeting) keeps you from winning enough impressions.

Also, quick clarification because this topic gets mixed with SEO: “keyword impressions” in organic search is a different system and set of levers. Everything below is about Google Ads keyword impressions in Search campaigns (and closely related concepts that can affect serving).

The 5-minute audit I run before changing anything

• Date range and segmentation: Confirm you’re looking at the correct dates, and check by device, location, and time of day to see if impressions are concentrated in a narrow slice.
• Campaign/ad group/ad status: Make sure the campaign is enabled, the ad group is enabled, and you have at least one ad that’s eligible to serve (not paused, not ended, not disapproved, not still under review).
• Keyword status: Look at each keyword’s status. “Eligible” is very different from “Eligible (limited),” “Not eligible,” or “Low search volume.”
• Bidding + budget flags: Check for “Limited by budget” at the campaign level and compare impressions against impression share loss due to budget and rank.
• Use Ad Preview & Diagnosis for one exact query: Test a real search term you expect to trigger, using the correct location, language, and device. This helps you avoid being misled by personalized live searches.

Reason #1: Your keyword isn’t truly eligible to show (status problems)

If your keyword status is anything other than “Eligible,” impressions will be suppressed or nonexistent, regardless of how great your ad copy is.

“Low search volume” (the most common silent killer)

When a keyword is marked “Low search volume,” it’s essentially sidelined because there’s very little to no search history for that term. This is usually caused by being too specific, oddly phrased, niche jargon, or a misspelling. The important nuance is that this status isn’t fixed by raising bids or improving Quality Score—it typically requires choosing different keywords or broadening how you match to searches.

What I do in practice: I keep the intent, but rewrite the keyword into a more commonly searched pattern (often fewer words), then use match type plus smart negatives to protect relevance. If the term is genuinely niche but valuable, I’ll also validate demand with planning/forecasting tools and by checking actual search terms that have triggered impressions historically.

“Eligible (limited)” due to below first page bid estimates

If your keyword is eligible but flagged as not competitive for first-page placement, it may still get impressions—but you’ll often see them drip in at low volume. This is a classic “you’re entering auctions, but not winning enough of them” situation.

In these cases, the fix is rarely “just raise bids.” Better results usually come from improving the full Ad Rank equation: bidding approach, ad relevance, expected click performance, landing page experience, and the expected impact of ad assets.

Ads/assets under review, disapproved, or restricted by policy

New or edited ads can take time to be reviewed, and anything disapproved can’t serve (which means no impressions). Even “eligible (limited)” policy restrictions can reduce where and when you appear. If impressions suddenly drop after edits, I immediately check ad and asset statuses and then add the “policy details” view in the interface to see what’s limiting delivery.

Reason #2: You’re eligible, but losing auctions (Ad Rank and competition)

When keywords are eligible but impressions are low, the next step is to quantify whether you’re missing impressions due to rank or budget. This is where impression share metrics become your best diagnostic friend, because they tell you the “why” behind missed opportunity.

High “lost impression share (rank)”

If you’re losing a meaningful share due to rank, your ads are often being filtered out by Ad Rank thresholds or simply outcompeted. Ad Rank is driven by your bid, the quality and relevance of your ads and landing pages, the competitiveness of the auction, and the expected impact of your assets, among other context signals. Importantly, Ad Rank is recalculated per auction—so results can vary dramatically by query, device, and location.

What consistently lifts impressions without blindly inflating CPC is tightening the relationship between keyword intent → ad message → landing page content. When those three align, you earn stronger performance at the same bid, and automated bidding systems also get better “inputs” to optimize against.

Quality Score issues that suppress impressions (even if you’re “eligible”)

Quality Score is not a direct “on/off switch,” but it is a strong directional indicator of whether you’re likely to win auctions efficiently. Its components are expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. If any component trends “below average,” impressions often suffer because you need more bid to compete for the same visibility.

In account audits, the most common root cause is ad groups that are too broad: too many intents crammed together, forcing generic ads and a generic landing page. Splitting by theme (or even by intent stage) frequently unlocks both impressions and efficiency at the same time.

Reason #3: Budget and bid strategy settings are quietly throttling delivery

Low impressions aren’t always a keyword problem. They’re often a campaign-level pacing problem. If your budget can’t support the auctions you’re eligible for, your ads will be held back to avoid overspending, which shows up as missing impressions due to budget.

High “lost impression share (budget)”

If you’re losing impression share due to budget, you’re demand-constrained. You can fix this by increasing budget, narrowing to the highest-value traffic, or adjusting bidding goals to be more realistic for your market. The “right” answer depends on whether you’re trying to scale volume or protect a strict efficiency target.

Targets that are too strict (especially with automated bidding)

If you use strategies like target CPA or target ROAS and set aggressive targets, you can unintentionally tell the system to avoid many auctions—leading to low impressions. This is especially common after tightening targets or during periods when conversion rates dip (seasonality, site issues, promo changes, competitive shifts). In these situations, impressions can fall even when budgets are available.

My rule: if impression volume is a priority, widen the system’s “permission to participate” (by easing targets or temporarily using a less restrictive strategy), then tighten back down once volume and conversion data stabilize.

Reason #4: Targeting is too narrow (and you’ve shrunk the auction pool)

Every targeting layer reduces reach. Sometimes that’s good. But it’s easy to over-filter your way into low impressions.

Location targeting settings that unintentionally cut impressions

Location targeting options can drastically change impressions. If you move away from the default behavior (which can include people in or regularly in a location as well as people who’ve shown interest in it) and switch to a stricter presence-only approach, many advertisers see an immediate impression drop. That drop isn’t “bad” if it improves lead quality, but it can be shocking if you’re not expecting it.

When diagnosing, I compare impression trends before/after any location setting changes and segment performance by location to confirm whether the restriction is desirable or overly tight.

Ad schedule, devices, audiences, and observation vs targeting

Low impressions often come from accidental “targeting” mode on audiences (instead of observation), overly limited ad schedules, or aggressive device bid adjustments. I’ve also seen campaigns limited by language settings that don’t match how users actually search in a region.

If you want more impressions fast, the cleanest first move is usually to relax constraints that don’t improve conversion quality, rather than expanding keywords immediately.

Reason #5: Match types and negatives are blocking you (more than you realize)

Keywords don’t map 1:1 to search terms. Your match types determine how close a search must be to your keyword to trigger, and the search terms report shows what actually matched and generated impressions.

Overly restrictive keyword sets (too much exact, not enough coverage)

If your account is dominated by exact match keywords, impressions can be limited simply because you’re not covering enough real-world query variation. The fix isn’t “go broad everywhere,” but to design coverage intentionally: use exact for proven high-intent terms, phrase to capture structured variations, and selective broad only where you can manage intent with ad group theming and negatives.

Negative keywords (including account-level negatives) that block valuable searches

Negatives are powerful—and easy to overdo. If you have account-level negative keywords, they can block search terms across many campaign types that serve on search inventory. It only takes one overly broad negative to suppress impressions across your whole account. I always check negatives at three layers: account, campaign, and ad group.

Also, remember that negative keywords behave differently than regular keywords in how they match, and they won’t always account for every close variant you might assume. This can create two kinds of problems: blocking too much (low impressions) or not blocking what you expected (low relevance). Both issues are solvable, but only if you audit negatives with real search term data.

How I boost keyword impressions without “buying” them with waste

Step 1: Fix eligibility first, then fix competitiveness

If you have any “Low search volume,” “Disapproved,” “Under review,” or “Not eligible” statuses, handle those before touching bids. Eligibility issues make every other optimization meaningless.

Step 2: Use impression share loss to choose the right lever

If you’re losing mostly to budget, you either need more budget or a narrower focus. If you’re losing mostly to rank, you need better Ad Rank inputs: clearer theming, stronger ads, better landing page alignment, and the right bidding approach for your goal.

Step 3: Strengthen ads and assets to raise Ad Rank efficiently

In competitive auctions, incremental improvements matter. Build responsive search ads that tightly reflect the keyword theme and the user’s intent, and add all relevant assets (sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, and any others that apply). Assets can increase prominence and improve expected performance, which supports Ad Rank at auction time.

Step 4: Expand coverage intentionally using search terms

Instead of guessing new keywords, I prefer to mine actual search terms that already triggered impressions. If a search term is relevant and converting, promote it into its own keyword (often exact or phrase) with tailored ad copy. This reliably grows impressions while preserving intent.

Step 5: If you must scale quickly, broaden safely

• Broaden match types in your best-performing themes first (not across the whole account).
• Keep ad groups tightly themed so ads remain relevant as query variety increases.
• Use negatives surgically to block clearly irrelevant intent, not to micromanage normal variation.
• Watch search terms, impression share, and conversion quality for the first 7–14 days after changes.

What “good” looks like when impressions are fixed

When the right issue is solved, you’ll see more than just a higher impression count. You’ll usually see impression share stabilize, “lost IS (rank)” or “lost IS (budget)” become explainable and controllable, and search terms become more aligned with what you actually sell. If impressions rise but relevance drops, that’s a sign you expanded coverage without enough intent control—so the next iteration is tightening structure and negatives, not retreating back to low volume.

Low keyword impressions in Google Ads usually come down to a few root causes: the keyword isn’t truly eligible to serve (for example “Low search volume,” “Eligible (limited),” under review, disapproved, or policy-restricted), it’s eligible but losing auctions because Ad Rank is too low (often tied to bids, competition, and Quality Score/intent alignment between keyword, ad, and landing page), the campaign is constrained by budget or pacing (“Limited by budget” and high “Search lost IS (budget)”), automated bidding targets like tCPA/tROAS are set so aggressively that Smart Bidding avoids many auctions, targeting is too narrow (locations, schedule, devices, audiences), match types are too tight (over-reliance on exact match), or negative keywords are blocking valuable queries. A fast way to diagnose is to confirm statuses and segments first, then add impression share columns to see whether you’re mainly losing on rank or budget, and finally use the search terms report to identify missed coverage or accidental blocks; if you want help turning that audit into concrete next steps, Blobr connects to your Google Ads and runs specialized AI agents (like Keyword Ideas Finder for safe expansion and Headlines Enhancer for relevance/CTR) to surface prioritized actions while keeping you in control of what gets applied.