How Long Does It Take PPC to Work?
PPC, or pay-per-click advertising, operates at a different speed than SEO. Businesses often expect to see results instantly, however it takes time and effort for a PPC campaign to get established and start maximizing the return on investment for the advertiser. While a PPC campaign will start to “work” right away, we advise clients that they will begin to see their best return on investment starting around the three-month mark. Let’s talk about why that is.
Data Collection and Analysis
PPC campaigns maximize their impact by being able to target ads to users who are most likely to respond to and click on the ad. The algorithms that manage your PPC work from historical data to decide how to best direct the campaign moving forwards… and this historical data doesn’t exist yet when the campaign is new.
As the program gathers data on the reception and response to your client’s ads, it will tweak the process to optimize: which ads should be shown more or less frequently, what platforms are best suited to these ads, should the bid be raised or lowered, and so on.
Optimization Period
For new PPC campaigns, Google usually imposes a seven-day learning period during which the client is asked not to make any changes to the campaign. During this time, the algorithms are testing the campaign and gathering the initial data needed to begin to optimize the performance of this particular campaign. This is very important work for the algorithms to complete and it is beneficial to not make any changes in the initial optimization period.
However, once the campaign has been tested, the campaign manager should review the preliminary results and begin to make tweaks to the PPC campaign to build on successes. You don’t want to “set it and forget it” – you need to be hands on with your PPC.
Ad Testing
Over the first weeks and months, your campaign’s conversion rate and results will begin to give you a sense of which ads users are responding to the most (which ads are getting the most clicks).
The PPC campaign manager will likely want to pause low-performing ads so that the most valuable ads get more plays, and the PPC team can review and build on the most successful ads. This is a place where regular input is essential, as you don’t want poorly-performing ads to be taking up valuable budget, and you also don’t want users to get fatigued of specific ads.
You will gain valuable data re which types of ads perform the best, and how to keep momentum in the campaign.
In Conclusion
We advice clients to give their PPC campaigns three months to develop and optimize before making any significant decisions on the future of the campaign. In the meantime, encourage them to work on other aspects of their SEO strategy, and make sure that when their ads are clicked on, that clients are redirected to relevant, fast-loading, visually appealing websites.
Learn more about our Pay Per CLick Advertising Services here.
