In this instructional YouTube video, Aaron Young—who claims 15,000 hours of Google Ads experience—explains why the first 60 days of a new Google Ads campaign are critical for establishing profitability and client confidence. He outlines the three algorithmic learning phases (0‑14 days, 14‑28 days, 28‑60 days), describing how Google evaluates ad relevance, timing, keywords, and audience signals. For each phase he recommends concrete optimization actions: early search‑term audits and negative keyword additions, mid‑phase ad‑copy split tests and a switch to automated bidding (e.g., Maximize Conversions), and later audience/demographic targeting, advanced bid adjustments, and budget scaling. A screen‑share case study demonstrates real‑world metrics—impressions, clicks, click‑through rate, conversions, and cost per acquisition—showing how these metrics evolve over weeks and months, and how change‑history markers align with optimization steps. He also promotes a downloadable Google Ads Optimization Checklist that maps each action to a timing cadence (every 72 hours, weekly, monthly, or quarterly). Finally, he stresses the necessity of a proper account structure before applying these tactics, linking to additional setup videos. The overall message is that disciplined, timed optimizations combined with Google’s automated learning produce steady growth in conversions and decreasing acquisition costs within the first three to four months.
Chapters
The first 60 days for any Google Ads campaign are the most important. And this is especially true if this is an account from a very new client which you've just signed. And the reason for that is because over the first 60 days, this client will be testing to see can you actually build their business with Google Ads. So in this video, I'm going to break down with you exactly what is happening over the first 60 days of any new campaign. And what are the core aspects of the Google Ads algorithm to that you need to look out for and what optimizations that you need to make. Because by knowing these two elements, you can ensure that your campaign is going to see success for the long term. And just in case we haven't met yet, my name is Aaron Young and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads master. My own journey started with Google Ads way back in 2010 when I started my first campaign to launch my own business. And I don't say this lightly, but Google Ads has changed my life. The reason for that is because Google Ads allowed me to grow my own business. And then since 2016, since 16, I've used Google Ads to grow countless businesses for my very own clients. And throughout that journey, I've actually put together a full list of all of the individual optimization actions that you need to complete in your Google Ads account so that you can see success. And further to that, this Google Ads Optimization checklist also lets you know exactly when you need to make each of these changes. Breaking down whether you need to make these changes every 72 hours, every week, every month, or every 90 days. And if you would like to get your very own copy of my Google Ads Optimization checklist, all you need to do is to follow the link in description. With all of that said, let's get into today's training. The reality is, is that most Google Ads campaigns will take at least 60 days before they start to become profitable. Now, I've had many campaigns that have seen success right from the very first day. But then I've also had some campaigns that can take up to three to four months before they actually start to see any success and any profits and and conversions for the business. But by putting those campaigns all together over the last 12 years, well over 90% of all of my campaigns have seen success in generating conversions and profit in the first 60 days. Today, I want to give you a breakdown of what is happening over those first 60 days in your new Google Ads campaign. Over the first 14 days of your new campaign. The main thing that is happening here is that Google is completing its learning phase. And what I mean by this is that the Google algorithm is is looking at your campaign versus competitor's campaign and trying to work out firstly, will your ads even be clicked on. And then once those clicks start to come through, the Google algorithm starts to work out what are the best times to show your ads, what are the best keywords to use to trigger your ads and what are the best people to show your ads to. And this is why sometimes you can see a really sharp increase in your impressions and clicks over the first couple of days and then they start to drop away over the second week of your campaign. And then between that 14 to 28 day period, Google algorithm starts to go a little bit deeper once again trying to find some extra information about what are the best performing keywords in your campaign and what are the best search terms to trigger your ads for which are more likely to see clicks. The algorithm also starts to look at what are the best performing headlines, descriptions and ad copies. And it's at this point that the algorithm will also start to look at what are the best audiences and demographics that see results like clicks and also conversions. And it's at this point at the 28 day mark where you as the Google Ads Manager start to make your first round of major optimizations. Because up until this point your main optimizations have been focused on completing keyword search term audits and product audits where you go through your list of keywords or your list of products and start adding in extra negative keywords or excluding underperforming products. Because at that 20 day mark is when you start to add in some extra ad copy split tests, looking at the results over the first 28 days and and setting up some new ad copy split tests that you want to test over the next 28 day period. And at this point it's also when you might start to introduce some automated bidding strategies like maximize conversions or maximize conversions value. And then we carry this through to the 60 day mark where we then take a fuller, deeper dive looking at audiences and demographics, trying to work out what are the best niches of people in terms of their demographics around age and income and and also their audiences in terms of what their interests are and their search habits are breaking down which ones of these categories are going to be giving you not only the highest level of clicks but also the highest level of conversions. And right now let's jump into a screen share so I can show you what this looks like in a real account. What we've got here is an account that was started in June and we're looking at the first 60 days of results. And what I've also done is I've also broken this down to a weekly time view, so, so we can look at these timestamps. What you can see here with these impressions, as we said, they've picked up and then they've started to drop away. And this has happened because the Google algorithm and also our own optimizations have gotten better at focusing the correct type of search terms and audiences that are going to result in clicks. And then when we overlay the clicks, you can see once again we saw a sharp increase. This did start to drop down a little bit and then this started to shoot up even higher once again, as the algorithm not only got to know more about our ads and more about our campaign, but also as me, the Google Ads Manager in this case, started to add in some of those higher level optimizations, we were able to see a sharp increase in these clicks. And a lot of this coincided with us working really heavy to start to increase that click through ratio, which over those first couple of weeks was ranging at around about 5%. We got it to peak up to 12% and then it's been sitting comfortably around that 8 to 10% mark. And as expected, we've seen more and more conversion conversions increase as we go along the path. And now when I broaden this out to a longer view, so this is looking at the first four months and you can see our impressions have stabilized out a little bit. It started higher in that first month with three and a half. Remembering that wasn't actually a full month because this started on about 14 July. But even with a lower impression account, we've been seeing a month on month increase in the number of clicks we've been receiving. And then when we add in our click through ratio, we've seen that steadily increase every single month. The same with our conversion starting down at about 23 conversions a month and this finishing up at over 66 conversions a month. So in that four month period, we more than doubled the amount of conversions that we were seeing. And while that was also happening, the Google algorithms learnings and our own optimizations work together hand in hand to drive down this cost per conversion. Where it peaked at $39, we were able to get it down to 27 and then down to $21. And that's the life cycle of a campaign that you want to be seeing over those first three to four months. And now what I want to finally take you through is I want to give you a look at the change history and what this will show you is the changes that we made at all of these different points. And you can see as time's gone on, the blue line has been going down because we've been lowering those individual conversion costs and the red line has been increasing as we've been increasing the total number of conversions. And if you're unfamiliar, these little triangles signify when we've made some major changes to the account. You can see over these first couple of weeks all we were focused on was keyword changes. And this is when we're running our search term audits and adding in extra negative keywords. And if you look at these totals along here, you can see by far the vast majority of changes that were made was all about our keyword changes. And that's why completing those search term audits and adding in those extra negative keywords are so important, because that's the main action that we've done over these four months. And just look at these results and how it's changed. And then when we started Moving into that 28 day period, we started to make some further changes. You can see in here we added in some bidding changes where we actually changed over to a maximize conversion strategy from Maximize Clicks. We also then started our first round of ad changes by adding in some extra ad copy split tests so that we could see which headlines were producing the highest level of click through ratios and the highest level of conversions. And then we also went through and started to add into more audiences so that we could get that threshold of clicks and impressions and coming from added audiences up above 80%. And then as we fast forwarded further, you can see once again we're doing some more split tests. We were adding in some extra negative keywords, we were updating our bidding changes and this is when we started to also scale the budget because we had really high confidence that we're already starting to see some positive changes in our Google Ads account. And then from here we just continue to repeat the cycle where we were doing some keyword changes and some weeks this was the only thing we're doing. We're adding in extra keyword changes and then at those 30 day periods, periods we're going through and also updating our audience targeting and also our audience bidding targeting. And that's a perfect example of what a successful Google Ads campaign should look like over those first 60 days where you start to see an increase in impressions and then that starts to drop as the Google algorithm and Your very own optimizations start to target in on the best performing traffic for your Google Ads campaign. And then when you saw my change history, as we start to move out past that 28 day period, we start to add in some extra more advanced optimization actions like your ad copy split tests and your advanced bid adjustments for your audiences and your demographics. And to make sure that you're doing that at the correct time and you're not over optimizing your account. Which is something you can actually do. Because a well optimized Google Ads account is where your manual optimizations are working hand in hand with with Google's algorithm and its own automated learning. And that is why my Google Ads Optimization checklist is so important. So remember, if you haven't got a copy of my Google Ads Optimization checklist yet, all you need to do is follow that link in the description so you can get yours today. So now that you know what the first 60 days of a well optimized Google Ads account should look like, you need to also make sure that you've got your account set up in the correct way. Because if you don't have the correct setup and correct structure for your Google Ads account, you won't be able to see results like those that I just showed you where you're seeing month on month growth in the number of conversions and also a month on month improvement in your acquisition costs. So if you want to go through and learn how to correctly set up a Google Ads search campaign, all you need to do is to watch this video right here. Or if you'd like to see the correct way in how you can set up a Google shopping campaign, just go through and watch this video right here. Once again, thank you for joining me and I look forward to seeing you very, very soon. See ya. And.
