When you launch a new campaign, it can take time to gather enough conversion data to make informed decisions.

Early on, it’s helpful to check that your campaign is bringing the right type of traffic to your website. Once you start to accumulate conversion data, you can assess your targeting and settings to refine the traffic as needed.

In this article, we’ll walk through the key steps to set your campaign up for success. Let’s start with the most important data points to watch in the early stages.

Weeks 1 and 2

In the first week or two of a campaign, you won’t have much conversion data yet. Your goal is to ensure your ads are showing for relevant terms and bringing in quality traffic.

Here are the key things to check when your campaign first goes live.

Search terms and n-grams

When launching a new campaign, you choose keywords and match types that align with your products and services. As match types have become looser over the past few years, the most crucial thing to check early on is that your ads are showing for appropriate search terms.

At this stage, you won’t add many negative keywords yet. First, you’ll want to confirm that your chosen keywords match relevant search terms. If they’re not, the best next step is to refine your keywords and match types.

If most of the search terms are relevant, you can start adding negative keywords to block any that aren’t.

Since campaigns can quickly generate thousands of unique search terms, spotting trends in these large data sets can be hard. That’s where n-gram analysis comes in — it helps you uncover valuable insights from your search terms.

N-gram data can help you to:

• Understand what search terms Google is matching your keywords to.
  • For example: keywords containing quote are often matched to search terms that contain how much or average cost.
• Add negative keywords as necessary.
• Find patterns among your search terms.
• Look for high-volume n-grams that don’t have specific ads or ad groups. You can create new ones as necessary.

Net new impressions

Make sure your new campaign isn’t just taking impressions and conversions from an existing one. It’s common to add a PMax campaign and see it perform well at first, only to realize that your Search campaign results have dropped.

If this happens with PMax and Search, read about the most common reasons behind it.

It’s less common with new Search or Display campaigns, but it does still happen. Take a step back and look at your account as a whole. Is your new campaign actually bringing in fresh impressions and conversions, or is it just pulling them from other campaigns?

Impression share

Impression share is one of the best metrics for increasing conversions.

In the early stages of a campaign, focusing on driving quality traffic helps set benchmarks for CPAs, ROAS, and conversion rates.

If you’re losing impressions due to budget constraints (and can’t increase your budget), try pausing some of your poorest keywords to free up more budget for your top performers.

If a low ad rank is an issue, focus on improving your quality score, landing pages, and ad group organization.

Weeks 3 and 4

Depending on your budget, it may take a few weeks to a month to gather enough conversions to start evaluating other settings and data points in your account.

New and qualified conversions

Just like with impressions, it’s important to check whether your new campaign is driving net new conversions or simply shifting them from other campaigns. Look at your account’s total conversions to see if they’re increasing overall.

Next, assess conversion quality. For lead gen, how many new conversions are sales or marketing qualified? If your sales cycle allows, you may also be able to track revenue back to these conversions and compare them to other campaigns.

For e-commerce, review metrics like the checkout amount, return rate, and other sales data. How do they stack up against your existing campaigns?

Depending on what you find, you can decide to adjust your targeting/settings or continue with your current approach.

When and where your ads are serving

New campaigns are often launched with the broadest settings possible. For example, they show ads all day, and target people both in and interested in your location.

Once you have some conversion data, it’s important to check these settings. Make sure to look at the data from a few different angles, too.
For instance, in this campaign, it looks like most of the conversions happen between 9 am and 9 pm.

Many PPC managers would conclude that you could turn off ads during low-conversion hours to save money.

However, the ROAS data shows that those off-hours actually deliver the highest return on ad spend.

This scenario is common if a lot of competitors use ad scheduling, leading to cheaper clicks and fewer conversions during off-hours. Since most of our conversions happen during the day, but ROAS is highest at night, we should run our ads all the time.

As you analyze your campaign data, make sure you aren’t just looking at one set of metrics before you make changes.

The second key area to watch is location targeting data. Do people in your targeted location or people in and interested in your location convert at different rates?

If interested in is doing poorly, check where those users are actually located. If many are out of your targeted regions, adjusting your location options may help.

Based on the campaign type, other segmentations to review include:

• Search partners vs. Google search
• Mobile vs. desktop
• Placement type: apps, video, sites

Match type effectiveness

After gathering a few weeks of solid conversion data, it’s time to assess your match types. Did you start with mostly exact and phrase match and are now considering adding broad match? Or did you begin with broad match and need to add your top-performing terms as exact match?

Look at your data by match type to see if changes are needed.

Ideally, most of your keywords should be exact match. If you have more phrase or broad match terms than exact match, we’d recommend copying those keywords as exact match equivalents.

Typically, exact match delivers the lowest CPAs, while broad match tends to have the highest. If you don’t see that trend in your data, it’s likely that you haven’t made your top search terms exact match keywords yet. Look at your top-performing search terms and ensure they also exist as exact match keywords.

If broad match is underperforming compared to your goals, focus on making sure your top keywords are in phrase and exact match. You can then pause broad match keywords with the most spend and the fewest conversions (or the most spend and the highest CPAs).

The goal with a new campaign is to train the bidding algorithms. These systems need to learn from your conversion data, so it’s crucial to feed them high-quality inputs. Even if broad match isn’t effective early on, you can test it again once the systems have had a chance to learn.

Throughout this process, continue analyzing your search term and n-gram data to add new keywords and negatives where needed.

Bid methods

The two most common bid methods for launching a campaign are Max clicks and Max conversions. They help when you just want Google to start showing your ads so you can get some data and optimize the campaign.

Once you have some conversion data to work with, you’ll often want to switch to Target CPA or Target ROAS bidding. Don’t forget to review your bid method to decide when it makes sense to switch.

If you are unsure whether to use a Max or Target bid method, this video breaks down the differences so you can make an informed choice.

Wrap-up

At a high level, the life of a campaign is pretty simple.

The first stage is planning. This is where you’ll decide on your ads, keywords, match types, and ad extensions before creating the campaign.

Once you launch the campaign, the priority is to ensure your ads are being shown appropriately.

• Are the impressions new for your account?
• Are the search terms and n-grams appropriate for your products and services?

Use your search term, n-gram, and impression share data to fine-tune your ad serving.

The next step is to refine your targeting:

• Ensure the conversions are new for the account
• Refine your location, time of day, and other settings as needed
• Change match types or add new keywords based on your data
• Use a bid method appropriate to your goals

Once you’ve optimized your campaign and are happy with the traffic quality, you can continue to refine or expand based on your long-term goals.