The first 90 days of a new PPC marketing campaign is its most volatile period. During this time, many changes and additions are implemented. When a Google Ads account doesn't have a preexisting negative keyword list in place, one must be built from scratch. It takes anywhere between 30 and 90 days for the foundation of a negative keyword list to be implemented, because a lot of the changes and additions that are implemented are based on the results/data that's coming in.
In particular, when a campaign has a budget that's on the smaller side, this data is slower to come in, meaning the optimizations take longer to implement as well.
We have campaigns that we've been running for well over a year, and they still get a handful of negative keywords added to them each day. And if we're using broad-match keywords, this holds especially true.
Sometimes campaigns begin to deliver results quickly. More often than not, these results take several weeks to start coming in. Even when built by knowledgeable professionals. We have to test different things to see what gains the most traction. But we also want to make sure we're not changing things too much or too frequently, as it will become difficult to tell what's working and what isn't if the campaign is constantly being meddled with.
This is why we like to wait at least a week in between big changes, so that we can make sure we're giving the previous changes enough time to show results, so that we can incorporate our edits with confidence.
Typically, the first week is no good. The campaign is in its infancy. All we're looking for in the very beginning is ensuring the campaign is actually running without errors and hangups, and that impressions and clicks are coming in. If we're already achieving a high click-through-rate, even better, but not expected. A good click-through-rate in our first week or two shows that all of our campaign settings, keywords, and ad copy are all in-line with one another, as well as our target customers.
Moving forward, the campaign will undergo further refinement to help bolster its performance. If we don't get any leads in the first month, we'll have to consider switching to a call-only campaign, or using a dedicated landing page, as it is likely the hang up may be the website itself.
There's still a lot of less-than-ideal traffic coming in at this point, as we are well short of that 30-90 days it takes to put a negative keyword list in place. But we're making modifications to the account on a daily basis, and the traffic looks better with each passing day.
Again, the first 30 days of a new campaign with no negative keyword list are just a building and accumulation period, where we are starting to gather data, starting to build a fence to keep less-than-ideal traffic out, and this process takes time that there unfortunately is no shortcut for.
If you take a look at your search terms for the first week or two, you'll see that many of them are quite good. But there are also many of them that are not. These are the types of queries that the negative keyword list will block in the future, but the construction of this negative keyword list will take some time.
With us, the negative keyword list grows rapidly, and as with any PPC campaign, the performance will improve with each passing month. The newer the campaign is, the weaker the performance. It will get better with each passing week, because of how attentive we are to the campaign. Far more attentive than the average PPC practitioner.
We hope this information helps shed some light on how PPC campaigns evolve, and as always, if you have any questions about anything, please let us know. Our pay-per-click marketing services page elaborates further on PPC campaigns, if you'd like to learn even more about them. We also offer social media marketing services, as well as search engine optimization services.
And if you're wondering which is best for your business, well, that's what we're here to help you figure out. All you have to do is use our free consultation tool to book a free consult with us, and after learning a bit more about your business and its marketing goals, we'll gladly steer you in the right direction.
Cheers,
-AS