How Do Google Ads Work and How Long Do They Take to Start Working?

Are you a business owner seeking to begin PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising on Google? Or maybe you're an established brand looking to switch PPC managers because your advertising isn't yielding results right away?

You should be aware of how long this effective ad channel takes to operate before you start.

Here's what you can anticipate: a successful Google ad campaign will mature over the course of at least three months, and it will take another four to twelve months for it to solidify.

I realize that seems like a long time.

So why the lengthy delay?

 Simply put, in order to effectively serve your ad to the appropriate audience, Google must spend a significant amount of processing time gathering a substantial amount of data.

I'll explain in this article how that time is used and how it can ultimately benefit you and your business.

The First Week of Running Google Ads: What to Expect

It typically takes Google 24-48 hours to review and approve your account after you first activate your Google Ads account.

Google requires an additional 7 days after you receive approval to:

• Assemble key information about your company.
• Learn more about your chosen subject.
• Look at your intended audience

Depending on the size of your company or how sophisticated your audience is, this process might take longer.

How to Determine If Your Ads Will Work

You should keep in mind that your daily budget will only provide a portion of the impressions and clicks you want during the initial ramp-up or onboarding period. This is so that Google won't immediately use up your entire daily budget.

So, how many impressions should you count as a successful start?

The ideal number of clicks per ad group (not campaign) per day is 15, and the ideal number of clicks per month for the keywords is 200–300. You should reevaluate your budget and campaign setup if you are not receiving this many clicks each day for each ad group.

After the First Week of Running Google, What to Expect

After the first week of account activation, you can be sure that Google will continue to serve your ads and collect data. However, DON'T anticipate leads to come pouring in.

In actuality, the start of your Google Ads campaign can take anywhere from two to four weeks.

Keep Calm and Promote

Try not to make too many changes to your ad account between the second and fourth week of the advertising campaign. You want Google to keep collecting as much information as it can without having to restart the procedure because of frequent account updates.

That's not all, though! The following information is crucial for you to understand:

Make sure your click-through rate (CTR) is not yet being ranked when you launch a Google Ads campaign.

How Important Is CTR, and What Is It?

The most important factor in figuring out how relevant your advertising campaign is to your target market is your click-through rate. Without this metric, Google must determine auxiliary factors like:

• Ad relevance for keywords
• Relevancy of ads to landing pages
• Site loading speed
• Account performance in the past

It would be risky for Google to display your campaign alongside other Google Ads advertisers with established track records, known as High-Quality Scores, if they can't yet accurately grade it. Your company will benefit from not having to directly compete with companies that scored higher than you because of this.

You will have the opportunity to update your ad after completing this learning process in order to have better conversions and a higher quality score. Then, you'll have a better experience if you're up against Google Ads, which are already well-known.

Let's talk more about the Google Ads learning phase now that you are aware of CTRs.

Understanding Your Learning Process for Google Ads

Your account status will be set to "learning" when you first start a new campaign or make significant changes to an existing campaign.

Other elements that result in the "learning" status are as follows:

• Modifications to the bid strategy's settings
• Updating an existing action or adding a new one to the conversion actions
• The use of a new smart bidding technique
• Modest compositional changes to the campaign
• Significant budget or bid changes
• Adhere to the 20% rule: Aim to keep budget changes to 20% or less of your current budget.
• Pause a campaign or ad group and then enable it
• A client's campaign recently entered a 5-day learning mode after pausing and then reenabling a campaign for a 1-day holiday.

Changes to ads, ad groups, or keywords typically do not start a learning period. However, you risk adding a learning period to your campaign if you make large-scale changes to several of these components.

Higher CPCs and Lower Conversions Are Not Alarming!

You should anticipate a decline in delivery and efficiency as you learn new skills. Your CPCs will be higher, your cost per acquisition will go up, and your conversion rates will go down, on the other hand. Yikes!!!

But relax; this is only a stage in the procedure. No need to worry—once your PPC manager implements our best practices, you'll recover from everything! In the learning process, this tendency occurs for the following reasons:

To decide when you appear in the ad auction, Google needs to know your Quality Score and bid. Google must also comprehend what generates the outcomes (conversions) you want it to optimize. In conclusion, the algorithm needs time to work with the signal and comprehend what has been shown to be effective and produce results.

After the Google Ads Learning Period, what should I do?

Your status will be displayed as "eligible" once the algorithm has collected sufficient data. From this point forward, you can modify the Google ad campaign for optimization purposes in the following ways:

• Ad text
• Specified keywords
• Negative search terms
• Audiences targeted
•  Location

Make sure to implement all the necessary adjustments to stop wasting clicks.

Timing and Optimization Changes

You must wait until there is sufficient data after each optimization change before you can assess its effects on the campaign.This process could take 1-2 weeks, depending on the extent of your changes. Having said that, you should lay a solid foundation early on to avoid unintentionally extending the learning process.

Unfortunately, you risk losing a lot of money with Google Ads if you work with the wrong company or hire the wrong expert. In fact, it has the power to make or break your business.

Because they selected the incorrect keyword type, did not include enough negative keywords, and even ran the campaigns around-the-clock, we have seen inexperienced PPC specialists and even large agencies lose tens of thousands of dollars each month.

Don't let higher costs dissuade you from working with knowledgeable PPC agencies. Trust me, it's worth spending $500 (or about 1% to 2% more than a less capable rival) on a knowledgeable agency that can design an effective Google ad campaign and aid in raising conversion rates for your company. Check out how Chatter Buzz Media's professional campaign optimization services can deliver digital marketing results that pay for themselves.

Re-optimization and Optimization of Google Ads

The time it takes for Google's algorithm to adjust to each change you make, along with the time it takes for you to optimize and re-optimize your Google ad, does add up to a 3-month process (7 days x the number of changes made = approximately 3 months).

Naturally, the length of time will depend on the type of advertisement you're running, the audience you're trying to reach, and other factors.

In essence, you're letting Google become an authority on business promotion!

An excellent tool to have when attempting to optimize all of these factors is a seasoned PPC firm that is a Google Premier Partner. If a company is not a Google Premier Partner, do not work with them (only 2% of PPC agencies are).

Here are some suggestions for managing your Google Ads for the first three months now that you understand how the algorithm functions.

The First Three Months of Google Ads Optimization

We understand that 3 months may seem like an eternity, especially after spending a lot of time and effort creating a Google ad. You need results right away and want to know that your investment is worthwhile. But the secret to making an effective Google ad is to be patient.

Consider the three months as a maturing process for the Google ad you created in order to stay motivated. The advertising campaign you've started will only get better with time, like many other things. Here are the steps you should take to make your advertising campaign as effective as possible during the three-month period.

Month 1: Data Collection

Data is your best friend in the first month of your advertising campaign. This means that the best course of action is to begin with a broad strategy. You'll be better able to determine which demographics eventually turn into new customers if you collect data from a wide range of people.

Our best advice for a comprehensive strategy is to not set your parameters too narrowly and to only use modified broad or phrase matches.

Utilizing location-based targeting is one way to achieve this. If your company has a single physical location, try marketing to residents of your city or a larger locality.

Once you know how successful this targeting is, you can change it to target more niche demographics.

Month Two: Make modifications

The next step is to modify various aspects of your advertisement and observe how these modifications affect the advertisement's effectiveness after gathering data from your ad results during the first month of the campaign. The two main aspects that are easily modifiable are the keywords and targeting.

Recall how we adopted a comprehensive approach in the first month? The second month is when this tactic succeeds. You can modify broad location-based targeting to target more specialized demographics once you've established how effective it is.

Another strategy is to start by describing yourself using a variety of keywords.

The trial-and-error approach we discussed above can be used to test various keywords, phrases, headlines, and other aspects of your ad. Some of Google Ads' built-in tools can also be used to accomplish this.

You can identify which keywords are producing results and which are not by comparing the effectiveness of your keywords during the first month of your advertising campaign. You can then improve your keyword selection during the second month to better entice potential customers.

Third month: Improve Your Results

The third month is when you can start seeing results from the changes you have made to your ad campaign after lots of hard work.It's time to put your winning advertisement into larger-scale use once you've found it. Consider adding more resources to your new and improved advertising campaign if the results you're getting are satisfactory. Reaching more potential customers and achieving long-term success may require a larger-scale campaign.

You can find out in real-time what your potential customers are looking for and how they locate your company by modifying and tracking your Google ad campaign.

This knowledge is priceless to you as a business owner because it can give you a complete picture of your local market and the tactics that will work in the future, in addition to aiding in upcoming advertising campaigns.

Make These Changes for the Best Google Ads Results

While modifying and optimizing Google ads, having an experienced PPC team of copywriters, data analysts, and ad specialists by your side can make all the difference for your campaign.

Why? Because these companies are trained to look out for a variety of crucial components when adjusting your advertisement.

Here are some of our own trade secrets for ensuring that Google Ads work to our clients' full potential:

• We do not favor automated bidding as a method of placing bids. We request a refund as soon as we notice that an ad account is using intelligent campaigns.
• Keywords: It's critical to select search terms that your target audience is already using when selecting effective keywords. That's what we mean by "commercial intent keywords." As a result, people who would be interested in learning more about your company may see your advertisement.
• Negative keywords: While identifying your negative keywords may seem confusing at first, doing so is just as crucial as choosing your positive ones. Negative keywords make it easier to identify the people who won't be interested in what you have to offer. As a result, you will spend less money on advertising and wasted effort.
• Ad text: Ad copy that works frequently requires several tries to perfect. A PPC expert frequently fails in this regard. They may be knowledgeable about the technical aspects and Google's algorithm, but they lack the ability to write effective advertisements. However, knowledgeable agencies are aware of these factors and can navigate easily around them.

Conversions: The incorrect conversion tracking is present in nearly 95% of all existing ad accounts that we have audited or taken over. If you are providing Google with inaccurate conversion data, Google won't ever be able to learn from the correct data and will keep serving ads to the incorrect demographic. As you can see, this will cause a lot of issues down the road.

If your Google ad isn't generating conversions, there might be a problem with the ad itself that could be resolved with a few simple rewrites. An adept marketing firm, such as Chatter Buzz Media, will be able to identify what needs to change and adjust your advertisement accordingly.

Final Words

In the first three months, don't anticipate miracles. Greatness requires patience and practice. Google Ads are an investment, not a one-time freak occurrence.

But if, after three months, PPC is still not yielding results, seek out expert assistance.

You can request a free PPC audit to have one of our seasoned Chatter Buzz advertisers review your account and identify the best ways to boost your results. With over 300 campaigns under our belt and a Google Premier Partnership, we are well-equipped to help you.