New Google Ads Campaign - What to Do First 7 Days

Okay, you just launched a brand new campaign in your Google Ads account and now you're frantically checking it every hour. You're freaking out. You're already starting to make adjustments to it because you think, oh, the last two hours I haven't had a conversion yet. Stop. In this video, I am going to share what you should be looking at, especially over the next week of launching a brand new campaign and then what you shouldn't be doing or looking at, which is most important. So I'm going to save you, hopefully thousands of dollars and also save you your own sanity because this is where a lot of people start screwing up after they launch a brand new campaign. Let's dive in. Okay? I'm in a real account and the first thing I'm actually looking at has nothing to do with the campaign itself. I'm looking at my conversion action. Is it set up my. Is my conversion tracking set up correctly? And so I want to make sure. Hey, did my tag. Is my tag set up? Does it show that it's active? If you just got going right, and you literally just set everything up, then what you might want to do is actually run through a test conversion if you can. You can also check the tags depending on how you set it up through like Tag Manager. So go. Absolutely. Triple check. Are my conversion tags set up correctly? Yes or no? Because who cares about anything else? If you don't have correct conversion tracking set up, then I want to make sure. Are my ads actually eligible? So I go into like here, this is a search campaign. I'm just hopping in real quick. I'm going to go into the ad that's live here and I'm just seeing the status. Is my ad actually eligible or did it get disapproved for some odd policy reason during setup? Again, foundation stuff here can't really do much without correct conversion tracking set up and working properly. And nothing's gonna work if my ads immediately disapprove for some weird policy thing. So I always go and check two foundational things, which is ads approved, conversion tracking set up correctly. Okay, so I have the foundational stuff I've already reviewed. Let's say it's been now a day or two. What am I actually looking at there? So there's a few things. One, is my campaign actually starting to get impressions and clicks? Yes or no? If it's been a full day or two and you're getting very little impressions and clicks, then there might be an issue with your bids or the keywords you're targeting. So I want to make sure like this campaign has a, well, it's $600 per day on a brand new account. You're probably not going to launch at $600 per day. So let's say you have $100 per day budget and two days goes by and you've spent like, you know, $20, something is off. Usually in most cases it's the bid strategy. So I want to make sure is the bid strategy set up correctly to a brand new campaign. So now if you watched any of my other trainings on this video, usually brand new campaign builds. I'm launching with like a max conversion bid strategy with like no cap or in some cases even doing like a max clicks or manual CPC with aggressive bids just to really jumpstart a campaign and start warming it up. So I check impressions and clicks the first few days and I do that based off of am I spending my budget, yes or no. If you're just trickling in some clicks each day, you more than likely do have a bidding issue or in some cases a keyword issue where you, you've only targeted like a couple maybe exact match keywords and there's just not enough volume on that. So look at clicks and impressions in those first few days. Make sure you're actually getting enough to spend your full budget. Okay, so now I've got clicks coming in. What is something that I'm going to also be checking? It's my search term report. So I'm going to go into insights and and then I'm going to head down here to search terms and I am just going to start checking what am I getting clicks on. If it's irrelevant stuff, then I want to start adding those as negative keywords in the beginning days of a brand new campaign. Checking your search term report to make sure you're not firing from a bunch of irrelevant traffic is highly important. I also then like to see what clicks am I getting from the relevant stuff that I'm trying to target and how are those hopefully going to start picking up. And then I want to make sure eventually I'm getting, you know, conversions on that later on down the road. And so I check the search term report on a brand new campaign pretty much every single day. And in most cases you will be adding negative keywords almost daily, if not weekly depending on the size of the account and how much data is flowing through it. But I'm always going through and reviewing my, my search term report in the beginning days. Okay, what KPIs am I actually looking at now? I already have in one of my courses that's inside of our school group. There will be a link in the description below to that school group if you want to go check it out. But I have this blueprint to success graph here in regards to KPIs to monitor and in the beginning I'm not looking at conversion rates yet. I'm not even looking at conversions and in most cases a brand new campaign will not look very pretty for at least a month or two, sometimes even longer. So I'm not looking at return on ad spend or conversion rate or any of that, right? I'm just making sure is this thing firing correctly? Are the search terms that my ads are getting clicks on relevant or not? And am I spending my full budget? Right? So I'm looking at clicks, click through rate and then over time I start to look at conversions and conversion rate. I can't expect high performance yet, I can't expect high conversion rates yet. So that's not something I'm too focused on. But what I am focused on is like I said in the beginning, am I spending my full budget? So that's the bidding thing or potentially keyword thing. And then if I am starting to spend my budget, am I actually generating enough clicks I want, especially on a search campaign, bare minimum 10 clicks per day. So if I incorrectly set up my campaign and I'm only getting five clicks per day and I'm still spending the full budget, something's off. Either a I did some miscalculations during the setup phase of knowing how expensive my market might be for the budget that I have, or my bid strategy might just be too aggressive and it's bidding too high. But but I want to make sure am I at least getting 10 clicks per day? Then as I start generating more clicks, so let's say a week goes by, I will then start looking at hey, what are my click through rates? Right? If I am below 2% or even worse than that, let's say it's less than 1%, then there's probably a big issue. Now if you're reviewing the search term report like I told you to do earlier, then you're going to catch the irrelevant stuff. But usually low click through rate means that the keywords you're targeting and the ads you're showing, there's a mismatch. It doesn't resonate with the searcher. Usually what I'll find is oh, you go into search term report, you're like no wonder it's firing right now for still a bunch of irrelevant Traffic, I need to go weed that out or maybe tighten up my keyword targeting. So I do want to make sure I have a decent click through rate. Listen, I'm not saying you need to go optimize for a super high click through rate right now. This is more of a warning check. Like am I at least getting a, you know, 2% click through rate in most cases right now? Again, you're going to want more than 10 clicks though. So this is why click through rate, something I look at after I've accumulated, you know, 50 to 100 clicks over about a week period. But I'm just, I'm not optimizing like crazy for it. I'm just checking for any red flags in regards to the structure of the campaign with my keyword targeting and the ads themselves. Because low, low click, click through rate just means something's off, you know, something is not set up correctly in regards to the search traffic and my ad copy resonating with the searchers. Okay, then you've got all of that set up, right? I want to hopefully start generating some conversions. So after I've had 50, 50, 100 plus clicks, I want to see at least a conversion or two, hopefully start trickling in. I'm not looking at performance again. You have not heard me say go look at roas, go look at your CPA yet. Nope, none of that matters right now. But by the time I have had a week of traffic, especially getting 10 clicks per day, I want to start seeing some conversion volume. Even more important, if, you know, I've gone on longer than a week and I have over a hundred clicks, right? And so I want to make sure am I actually getting some conversions and if I'm getting high intent search traffic, after reviewing my search term report each day and clicks for that high intent stuff and I still don't have any conversions, especially after, you know, 50, 100 clicks, then something might be off, right? Is the tracking still good? I checked that earlier, but maybe I need to go triple check again. Is my offer any good, right? Is a competitor right now doing something with a sale or beating me on an offer or price? Why am I not converting on high intent traffic right now, even though I've already had about 50 to 100 clicks with super high intent searches, right? So I want to. That's all I'm checking again. These are all warning checks. Am I, am I getting something so far? Especially if everything's fundamentally been set up correctly. What a lot of people want to do is they go a week and they Start adjusting their bid strategies. They start going in and redoing ads and adding more keywords. Stop doing all of that in the beginning. Your goal is a foundational good setup, which if you watch any of my training videos or go through my course material inside of our school group called PPC Copilot, you're going to get all of that right. So if you set up everything correctly, your goal is to monitor right now. That is it. Do not go in and get your fingers in there every single day or watch it every hour and freak out and then want to go make changes. That is not the correct thing to do. Most people who do that, by the way, wreck their campaigns and they never get going. Your job in the beginning is to monitor the metrics and key functions that I just explained in this video. And then after you accumulate more data, you can start going into actual optimizations. That's usually in most people's cases, about a month out. So usually in the first seven days to 30 days, you're there to just monitor, make sure things are performing correctly in regards to budgets being spent. You're getting good high intent clicks on your ads, so you're getting good traffic. And then over time, hopefully you start getting some conversions. You are not there though to really go into an optimization stage yet you're there to monitor. And the only optimization you're really doing in the beginning is adding negative keywords while looking at those search terms. So if you take anything from this video, stop getting in to your campaign and wanting to change things. When you first launch, monitor what I just told you to monitor and you will be off to a very successful start, more than you would be if you sit there and make changes every five seconds.