It’s important to note that impressions on the display network function is little different in that your ad could have appeared but may not have been viewable. 

How to use the impression metric

1. You look at your impression number when first launching a campaign to see if its ‘live’ and that your campaign is activated.

2. You can use impressions as part of your awareness and reach goals - but not in isolation as impressions are only the amount of times your ad has appeared.

Common issues when you have zero impressions

Check the following if you’re having trouble getting impressions on your search or display campaigns:

1. Use appropriate daily budgets.

Enter a daily budget that’s greater than your expected average cpc (it’s highly unlikely your ads will serve if you’ve entered a daily budget of $1 and your avg cpc is greater than that).

2. Check your ad & asset approvals. 

Your ads won’t be able to serve unless they are marked as approved. If ads are disapproved they’ll be prevented from being served, thus you’ll have zero impressions.

3. Overlapping keywords.

If you notice that some keywords in your account are not getting impressions, that could be totally normal. Other keywords in your account may be receiving the impression. Google Ads has expanded the way their match type system works and even refined exact match keywords act a bit more broadly (excuse the pun) than they used to.

4. Exhausted account budgets.

You could be receiving no impression because your account budget is either exhausted, stopped or not entered for the current date.

5. Campaigns, adgroups, keywords or ads have been paused.

If you have parts of your campaign that’s paused then you won’t be receiving any impressions. A search campaign has multiple levels and they all need to be activated in order for your campaign to be ‘live’.

6. No search volume.

Your keywords may have no impression because there isn’t any available search volume (no one is searching for that keyword). Consider creating new variations and themes for your campaign.

7. Negative keywords are blocking your keywords.

You could have certain broader negative keywords that are overlapping with your keywords. Carefully review your negative keyword list and how they are applied in order to ensure they won’t affect the words and phrases you want to have visibility on.

8. Ads are in review.

Even if you do everything perfectly, there is still a bit of time needed for responsive ads to be reviewed by Google’s automated system. In my experience your ads could be live within 4 hours of activation, however, it could sometimes take up to 24 hours for the ads to be approved.