They say that patience is a virtue. This is especially true when it comes to PPC campaign management.
How often have you created a new PPC campaign on Friday and waited until Monday before your ads were approved? What about those new ads that your client wanted live yesterday but are waiting on approval as well? Sure, those times can be aggravating but they pale when it comes to the ultimate game of patience: Waiting for enough data to accumulate before modifying your campaign strategy.
Too often people want to change their PPC campaign strategy without giving it enough time to run. I think most PPC managers will agree that this is especially true when customers, other managers and/or other interested parties (who are not responsible for the day to day campaign management) are waiting for “their results”.
When the campaign is new or there has been a shift in strategy, campaigns take time to level out and become stable. The amount of time needed is directly correlated to the complexity of your PPC campaign; this includes the number of ad groups, number of keywords, campaign geography, campaign goals, conversion tracking, landing pages, etc.
I have always understood that there needs to be enough data to analyze before changing course and I’ve always tried to set that expectation with clients. SiteWit is no different. Although SiteWit’s PPC Automated Bidding starts within 24 hours of purchase and SiteWit’s Predictive Analytics engine begins monitoring your campaign the moment you decide to optimize with us, we make sure our PPC Management Software clients know that our PPC software requires a minimum amount of data before our algorithms make any campaign recommendations.
So the next time you launch a new PPC campaign or sign up a new customer, be sure to set this expectation. Once you launch the campaign, everyone needs to be patient and wait for enough data to come in before making any strategic decisions about changing your PPC campaigns.
What do you think? Is patience really a virtue when it comes to creating successful pay-per-click campaigns? If not, tell us why.
