You may be trying your hands with a new Adwords account or may have given this task to an agency to manage, you may find it intriguing why the first weeks are so bumpy. Google Adwords is the fastest and sure shot way to start getting traffic from Google especially on the keywords which are relevant to your business. However Adwords may not be as ‘plug-n-play’ for the new accounts as you think. There is more than what meets the eye. It is much more than setting up an account, plugging in your keywords, writing some random adcopies and defining max bid. You will soon be hit by various challenges in your face; right after launching your Adwords campaign.

Let’s learn what to expect in first 30 days. These observations have been compiled from experiences of various PPC experts who have managed host of accounts in last few years.

• Google’s approach to New Accounts – Google is watchful with new accounts and it does not expose them fully until a week or 2 have passed and some history has been earned. And this might be owing to Google’s vested interest of ensuring earnings from already running ads with history. Even if you give higher daily budgets, you may not see the desired traction due to the same reason and poor quality score.

• Impressions/CTR – Our observation is, Google may not make too many impressions available for some accounts initially. Google wants newbies to prove their worth gradually to earn visibility share, before it starts giving them share from its cash giving advertisers. However there could be more reasons to it. Read on.

• Keywords – In absence of no history, it’s wise to incorporate as many keywords as possible. It’s only after few days of run you discover that some of the keywords are fetching too much traffic but not yielding ROI for you. You can make a decision on keywords choice after you have already burnt some dollars and accumulated substantial stats.

• How much CPC is good CPC? On a safer side, you start slow and keep the CPC moderate, but as you realize your bids are not high enough to stay on the first page of results, you keep raising them few notches up every day. It’s only after 30-45 days, you have critical mass to make inferences on the CPC and desired ad positions. You may not know until you have substantial data to support your most suitable cost per click and best position to hang in.

• Match Types– Each keyword can be set up in 3-4 match types and only after accruing impressions and clicks and running search query report, you can make a judgment call on which match type should be left in or left out.

• Negative Keywords– Though finding negative keywords is an ongoing practice, but maximum burn out happens initially when there is not much information available on negative keywords. While traditional keywords trigger your ads to display for relevant searches, negative keywords prevent your ads from being triggered. Negative keywords are those phrases or words which after blending with your regular keywords, change the context or turn into keywords which are not relevant to your business.

• Adcopy Testing– Initial few days you can’t make a choice between your performing and non performing adcopies as you have to allow them to accrue enough stats. After seeing the overall CTR of the campaign, one has to take an informed decision about tweaking adcopies to make CTR better. Taking cues from competitors’ ads also help in making a killer adcopy.

• Time of week/day – Initially you don’t know which time of the week or which part of the day would be best for conversions, so you wait to build stats around it and accordingly enable day parting settings in your account.

• Budget and aggressive Bidding– If budget is limited( which is mostly the case) and there is a constant push from Google to go aggressive with bidding to sustain the first page, you end up burning a lot of budget too fast which can make you run short of budget for the rest of the month.

Hope this information will set you expectations right about a new Adwords account. For any queries, please leave the comment.

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