What should I do after launching my Google Adwords campaign?

After launching any Google Adwords campaign, the first 48 hours are very important.

Mainly there will be two objectives that we intend to achieve:

1. Make sure that our campaigns work correctly.
2. Communicate our vision of the campaigns to our external or internal client.

We will review several elements, to make sure that our campaigns work correctly:

 Impressions and clicks

At this time it is key to know how the ads are appearing and performing. The easiest way to do this is that after a few hours or 24 hours from the launch of the campaign, we can go to the main panel of Google Adwords. If your campaigns have been successfully launched, they should have started generating impressions and some clicks. You can set a time period “Today” if the campaigns have been launched a few hours ago or “Yesterday” if they were launched during the previous day.

3 tips to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns

CTR

The CTR or Click Through Rate is the number of clicks a link obtains with respect to the number of impressions. It is always calculated as a percentage and is a metric that is normally used to measure the impact of a campaign in Google Adwords. Having a good CTR is a synonym that my ads are performing good or attracting attention.

How can we evaluate what is a good CTR?

First of all, for this metric, I would recommend approximately 48 hours to make an analysis of your own. We cannot tell if a CTR is good or bad if your campaign has a few clicks.

If your CTR is below 3{e7d47c856744df2248f2195fd30fbdddbceff01679799ef4d661e6a47ab6faaa} and you are in first positions, possibly this means that your ads are not attracting attention. If it is well above 5{e7d47c856744df2248f2195fd30fbdddbceff01679799ef4d661e6a47ab6faaa}, it can also be synonymous with paying too much. Although we have given this percentage as a reference for CTR, it should be noted that the CTR varies depending on the position in which you are. In this way, you cannot ask for the same CTR for an ad in the first position as in the third or fourth.

If you want to know more how to improve your CTR, you can read this post.

Budget spending

After 24 or 48 hours, you should review the budget consumption. Is it close to the planned? Is it far below? If you see that the spending of your budget is much lower than the daily budget established, you should think about creating new campaigns or ad groups to increase the segmentation. Ideally, the consumption of daily budget is close to that established. It can also happen that campaigns are limited by budget. This is important as much important as CTR, communicate it to the client so that he understands the start of the campaigns.

Average position

As in the CTR, for this metric, I recommend spending approximately 24 or 48 hours to analyze results. The average position is the metric that indicates the average position of my ad for a search query. So position 1 would be the first result, 2 the second, and so on. It is important to have a good positioning at the beginning of the launch of campaigns, this is key to earn a good CTR and thus Quality Score.

We recommend an average position from 1.7 to 2.7. If you are above this, type 1.0 means that you are possibly paying too much. If it's smaller, maybe you could think about improving visibility.

Searches

It is important to know what searches your ads are displaying? How are people finding you? At the start of any campaign, it is very important to develop a broad list of negative keywords, in order to prevent clicks from searches which are unrelated to your products or services. But we can always keep in mind that there are words that we have not taken into account. So the best way to avoid this is to go to the keyword part, and within this go to “searches”. There you can see what searches your ads are being displayed. The idea is that if you detect some kind of non-relevant search keywords, you can add them to negative keywords list.

Conversions

It would be interesting to know how many conversions have happened. This can be seen in the column conversions, within the main menu of Google Adwords. Before this, it is very basic to make the conversion settings correctly with the code implementation. On the other hand, if conversions have not yet arrived, do not disappoint. This can be quite normal. The most important thing is to make sure that the code works perfectly. You can do this with a tool called Google Tag Assistant, check whether the conversion page is redirecting to thank you page after completing the conversion.

Read More about conversion rate optimization

      What is conversion rate optimization and why it is so important

      Where to include your CTA to improve conversion

 Remarketing code

Does the remarketing code work correctly? It would be interesting to see if the remarketing audience is increasing or not. This is important for the future launch and configuration of remarketing campaigns with display or search. If you make delay in reviewing this, you may find no audience when you want to launch remarketing campaigns.

Advertisements

Check the ads tab if they are showing correctly and also if they are approved. You may have created your ads, launched the campaign and maybe one of them is rejected because of your destination URL which does not work.

Communication 

It is very important to correctly handle the client's expectations before the launch of campaigns. Google Adwords produces results, but it also needs analysis and optimization time. The first 48 hours are very important to talk with the internal or external client and tell them your vision about the campaigns. How is the start? How do we see the first metrics? Have the first conversions already arrived? How are people finding us? We all know that 48 hours is very little time to draw conclusions, but I am sure that your client will love to know that everything works correctly and some additional interesting observation.