FIRST 90 days of a Google Ads Campaign (Managing Client Expectations)
In this instructional video Aaron Young explains why a Google Ads campaign must run for at least 90 days before judging profitability. He outlines the typical conversion acquisition window (10‑17 days) and emphasizes that the first two weeks are a learning phase where Google tests search terms, audiences, devices, and other signals. Young then breaks the campaign timeline into three 30‑day blocks, describing the data‑driven optimizations that should be performed after each period: 1) Days 1‑30 – collect data, conduct search‑term audits, add keyword exclusions, and begin basic audience and location analysis. 2) Days 31‑60 – review click‑through rates, conversion rates, cost‑per‑conversion; test new ad copy; adjust bids and exclusions for demographics, age, gender, household income, and locations. 3) Days 61‑90 – compare performance to the first two months, refine ad assets (especially for Performance Max campaigns), adjust asset‑group headlines, and, if applicable, prune under‑performing products from the feed. He demonstrates these steps with screen‑share examples of a Search campaign and a Performance Max campaign, showing how to navigate keywords, search terms, ads, audiences, and asset groups. Throughout, he stresses setting clear client expectations that the campaign will run for 90 days before a go/no‑go decision. He also offers free Google Ads optimization and e‑commerce checklists to guide ongoing weekly, monthly, and quarterly tasks.
Chapters
Whenever I hear someone say that they tried Google Ads and they just didn't get any results, or that Google Ads was just a big waste of money, the first question I always ask them is, how long did you actually run your Google Ads campaign for? And it's no surprise at all that most of the time the answers that I get range anywhere from two weeks, three weeks, or in some cases, one month. And this is usually the reason for why people didn't see success with Google Ads in the that reason is, is that they did not run their Google Ads campaign long enough in order to be able to see profitable results with Google Ads. And the confusion lies in this is, I do get it. Is that because Google Ads is search based in that when someone completes a Google search, they will see your ads, there is that assumption that you will see profitable conversions straightaway. I've had cases where even after just pressing go on the campaign in the morning, I'll have new clients ringing me that that afternoon, wondering why they can't see their ads or why they haven't got any conversions yet. And even though that yes, Google Ads is searched based, especially the way that Google Ads is functioning now, and especially if you're using campaigns like Performance Max, your acquisition windows for Google Ads can take one, two, or sometimes even four or six weeks before you get that conversion action. In fact, right now, the average conversion acquisition window that I'm seeing from that time when someone first either sees your ad or clicks on that ad through to when they complete that conversion is ranging between 10 to 17 days. So in the majority of the cases, it's taking just under or just over two weeks before we see those conversions. So you can see the problem there, that if you're only allowing your Google Ads campaign to run for two or three or four weeks, you're not actually allowing enough time for all of your conversions to feed in so that you can see and really make a real decision on whether Google Ads is going to be profitable for your business. And this is why if you're setting up a Google Ads campaign for your own business or, or if you're setting up a Google Ads campaign for a new client, you need to make it very, very clear that the expectation is that you need to run this campaign for three months. So 90 days before you make that decision as to whether Google Ads will be profitable for you and your business. And right now, let me show you why you need to wait for 90 days. So I want to break down what's happening over the first 90 days of your new Google Ads campaign. And the most important thing is that especially of those first 14 days, you, your campaign is in a learning phase. And what that means is that Google is going through and testing some different search terms, testing different audiences, going through the first round of device testing and it's looking at a lot of different data. So generally what your account looks like in the first 14 days, it'll be a very different picture over the coming weeks and months. So straight away you can see the problem of only allowing your campaign to run for 30 days is that for half of that time to the first two weeks, you, your campaign hasn't even got out of that learning phase. And then from there for the remainder of that first 30 days, that's where you're going through. And Google is doing that testing. But also as well us at the campaign management level, we're only then after that first 30 days, we've got enough initial data around our keywords, our ads and our audiences that we can then start to make some initial optimizations. So for example, after the first 30 days we would have reviewed the click through ratios and the conversion rates of our ads and we would be setting up a new round of ad copies to tests. We would then also be looking in that first round of audiences. And then from there we would either look to add in some new audiences if we're not getting enough data in our audiences, and we can start to add in some bid adjustments and even add in some initial exclusions. And then also from there from keywords, we would have had our first 30 days of going through and running those all important search term audits. And then from there the next block of 30 days. So from day 31 through to day 60, that's where we're going through and we're doing a second round of testing. So it's only here that we've got some comparative tests between the first 30 days and the second 30 days. So from here after the first 30 days, we would have looked at that initial data, made some decisions, added in some optimizations. So for example, adding in another round of ad copies to test. And then at that end of that 30 days, we're then going through our third round of testing. But even from that 61 day to the 90 day mark, it's really important to know that we've only had 30 days of results. So that first 30 days we are flying a little bit blind. We then see some initial data, we can then make some decisions and then we can start to go through the process of improving the results of your campaign. And then as we move forward, we then go through and complete a 90 day review and then restart this whole cycle again. So you can see the problem with a lot of people who say that Google Ads wasn't profitable for their business. The reason for that is, is that if they stopped after the first 30 days or even after the first 60 days, they haven't really had a lot of testing that's gone through. And it's very rare that you're going to get your ad copy and your audience targeting and all of your location targets right on the very first time. But if you've set your accounts up correctly after the first 90 days, you'll definitely have some real data that you can start going through and really then look to set up the next 90 day cycle so you can start to see some really big improvements around things like your conversion rates and your click through ratios. So when you're starting a new campaign for your own business or for one of your clients, you need to make sure that that expectation, and especially if this is a campaign for a client of yours, you need to make it very, very clear that we're wanting to run this campaign for the first 90 days before we make a clear decision on whether we're going to stop that campaign. And when I'm going through and setting these expectations, I'm even going through and really clearly communicating that in those first 30 days we're very much about collecting data so that we can make our first round of really core optimizations after that 30 day mark. And then it's only at that 60 day mark where we're able to have some really comparisons between the first 30 days and the second 30 days. And to help you further with what you should be looking at after the first 30 days and after the first 60 days, let's jump into a screen share so I can show you some real life Google Ads accounts. So right now we're looking at 90 days of data for a search campaign. I will go through and do this on a performance max campaign as well. So what we want to be doing is when we go into our campaigns and then once we're in the campaign, select that individual campaign. And then when you're in the campaign, the core section that you want to be going through is you firstly want to be going into your keywords and your search terms. So we go keywords and then we want to go into our search terms. And this is one of the core actions that you'll be doing throughout the first 30 days. Is what you're going through is you're going through the actual search terms which have triggered your ads. And as you can see from here, I've gone through and done two things. I've firstly added any search terms which are generating conversions and they're well targeted and they've also gone through and added in any exclusions which are not relevant. So you could get the situation where for this one it did trigger a conversion, but when we followed it up is that it was just for a different type of product. So it was a kind of a spammy type of conversion. So we excluded that. And then there was some other ones around that just weren't offering the same product. So we went through and excluded those. So that's the first thing you're going through. Especially in those first 30 days. You'll be doing that process two or three times a week. And then from there after that first 30 day block, this is the time when you can start to go through and review your audiences and also review your ads. So let's firstly go up into your ads. And throughout this time period we had two different ads running. So what we're able to look at is that we were able to see that this one had a much higher click through ratio but it had a lower conversion rate and ultimately it had a much higher cost per conversion of $56 versus 23. So what we then did is that we started in an extra ad and this one has only just gone through some its first round of testing. So what we did is we paused that ad that had the, it had the high click through ratio but the lower cost per conversion. And we went through and we started another test. And what we're looking at here is that we took some of those elements which we believed was giving it a higher click through ratio and we wanted to see if we can get that lower cost per conversion. Now this one is still running, so we're not going to make any further differences there. But as you can see from that, we took the data from the first 30 days, we then implemented some changes so that we could do that second round of testing. And then the other area that you want to go into is your audiences and especially for your search campaigns in your audiences, you're not only looking at here whether you need to add in some different bid adjustments to focus some traffic on the better performing audiences is you can also do the same thing for your age, gender and demographics. Now I like to use this summary chart and I always put in there the cost and comparing it to the conversions. And what we want to see here is that if there's any really high spending areas where we're not getting those conversions, we can go through and exclude them. And if you're not based in the eu, so if you're based in Australia or Asia or the Americas, you can also see this on the household income. And once again, you can go through and add any exclusions. We haven't done it here, here, although we have added in some bid adjustments to this top income bracket because we're getting the highest number of conversions there. And the same for the age, because, you know, 18 to 24 age bracket. We're not getting any conversions, but it's not a high spend. So we're still happy to test that through. But as you can see through here, we've added in our bid adjustments to these core age brackets which are giving us the highest level of conversions. And remembering what we're saying is that after that first 30 days, we don't have that data. So we're not able to start to make those decisions until we have more and more data. And then if you were to do a performance max campaign, the process is a little bit different because we don't have as much data inputs. But the main area that you want to be going through is you want to be going into your asset groups and then from there you want to go into your view details. And what we always want to be doing is we want to be going through and whenever we get any of these ones, we're seeing a low mark. We want to go through and edit these and add in some new headlines. Now, I'm not going to change these right now. And the reason for that is because we only changed these asset groups in the last seven days. So we want to allow more time for these headlines to get some further data. And you can see some of these are still pending. So we'll give these a little bit more time. And the other things that you can go through is that you can also go through and review your locations. Once again, you're going through that same process of similar to what we did with for our audiences is we're looking to see is are there any areas where we're having a high spend with no conversions? So you can see through here, obviously Singapore is a clear winner for us and some of these other areas, like Australia, we need to go through and make that decision of whether we're going to remove this or refine this further because we're getting a really high cost per conversion there. And then if you're running a performance max campaign that has an active product feed in it, you'll also see this option for listing groups. So you can see for this one in here because this performance max campaign is based for a service based industry and we don't have an active product feed, we don't have that listing group option in there. But when you have a performance max campaign running which has this product group, you can see the listing groups in there. And another action tool that you can start doing after the first 90 days, you wouldn't do this in the first 30 days. After the first 90 days you can go through and start reviewing your product feed and looking at are there any products where you're getting a high number of impressions with no conversions and if you are getting the case where you're getting a high level of cost and impressions with no conversions, you can go through and make that decision to exclude any products. But I hope from that process you can see that you can't start to make any of those optimization decisions so that you can improve the results of your campaign until you start to get those data segments coming through every 30 days. So that's why it's highly important that when you're starting a new Google Ads campaign or onboarding a new client, that you're giving that clear expectation that we want to be able to run this campaign for 90 days before we make the decision to turn it off. And to help you with all of those optimization checks that I just ran you through in that screen share, I want to give you free access to my Google Ads optimization checklist, which is perfect for search campaigns or if you're running shopping or performance max campaigns and you want to make sure that you're running those checks in the right way. I want to give you access to my Google Ads ecommerce optimization checklist. And both of these lists will take you through all of the actions that you need to complete. But it also lets you know whether you need to complete that action every 72 hours, every week, every month, or every 90 days. And if you want to get access right now, all you need to do is to follow that link in the description below. Once again, thank you for joining me. It's been my pleasure having you here on this free Google Ads training video. I know that this will be of some great value to you. And to help you even further, if you do want to see some greater details of how I go through and optimize a search campaign, just go through and watch this video. Right here. Or if you'd like to know more about how I go through and optimize my performance. Max campaigns go through and watch this video right here. Thank you again. See you next time.
