Fix No Traffic Expected Check Your Campaign Settings in Google Ads

Pay Per Click is one of the easy options for product owners to drive traffic to their landing pages. There are many options available for running a PPC campaign like Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Ultimately, website owners prefer Google Ads to target traffic from Google Search networks. Though the process of creating ad campaign is easy in Google Ads, you will face warnings when not using proper settings. “No traffic expected. Check your campaign settings to fix this” is one such warning and we will explain how to fix this in this article.

Where Can You See the Warning?

Google has four simple steps for creating a publishing your ad campaign in Google Ads. The first step in the ad creation process is to setup your search network, locations, budget, keywords, audience, etc.,. After this, when you move to next “Set up ad groups” step, Google will show the daily estimates in the sidebar to give you an idea of how much traffic you will get. You can see the warning message in the sidebar with no link to quickly go back to the settings from where it comes.

The warning will say “No traffic expected. Check your campaign targeting settings to fix this.” As it is a warning, you can save and continue to the next step. However, Google will stop you at the final step and show you the same message to fix it. You can’t publish the campaign unless fix the warning.  

Fix No Traffic Expected Check Your Campaign Settings Error

Click on the “Fix IT” link which will take you to the second step of “Set up ad groups” settings. However, you will not have any clue from where the error originating. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the error before trying to resolve it. Here are the parameters under campaign settings that can affect your traffic:

• Keywords
• Audience
• Budget

Let’s try to change one by one and see what happens.

Related: Free Google Ads advertising coupon codes.

Changing Keywords

Out of the above options, keywords is the only one available under “Set up ad groups”. Therefore, most probably you need to adjust your keywords to fix this error. After entering your URL and product/services name if any, Google will automatically populate a list of keywords from that page. If you change those keywords with your own then Google will estimate the traffic for the budget provided.

As you see in the below example, the warning message is shown when we enter custom phrase “symbol shortcuts” as keywords for our home page.

Let us change the keywords to “Symbols” and the message will automatically change to “Low traffic expected. Check your campaign targeting settings to fix this.”

Therefore, the message actually appears because we have used less relevant keywords for the URL. Let us again change the keywords to more relevant like “SEO”. You can see the warning message completely disappeared now.

The best option is to just delete all your custom keywords and you will see a “Get Keywords” button.

Click on the button to get the automatic keyword phrases that Google thinks is a good fit for your URL. Now you can include your custom keywords by adding in the list or replacing some of the them with your own.

In this way, you can get rid of the no traffic expected error as well as get decent traffic for your daily budget.

Check Audience

If changing keywords do not help then go to the step one and check whether you have selected any targeted audience for your ad campaign. The “Targeting and audiences” has three parts – location, language and audiences. If you have only selected USA or specific country then select “Enter another location” and click on the “Advanced search” button.

This will open a pop-up showing maps where you can insert bulk locations to target larger audience group.

After that make sure to select the recommended options under “Location options”.

Depending upon the selected countries, you can add multiple languages to increase the reach of your ad campaign. Finally, click on the “Audiences” section and select “Observation (recommended)” method.

These settings will help you to increase the target audience base and fix the no traffic expected error.

Check Budget

The final settings you can check is to increase the daily budget. Ideally, it should not impact the no traffic situation. However, when you broaden your keywords and audiences, it makes sense to increase the budget accordingly. Otherwise, you will see hardly few clicks can consume your budget in the estimates. In addition, make sure to provide bit higher “Maximum CPC bid limit” so that the error message will not appear.

Click “Save and Continue” button to proceed to the next step. You will not see no traffic expected error in the sidebar, proceed to final step and publish your ad campaign successfully.