Are you the owner of a company that is interested in beginning pay-per-click (PPC) advertising with Google? Or, maybe you run a well-known company and are wanting to switch PPC managers since your advertising isn’t producing results as quickly as you’d like.

You need to find out how long it takes for this effective advertising channel to start working before you begin.

You should anticipate the following: it will take at least three months for a successful Google ad campaign to grow, and then between four to twelve months for the campaign to evolve into a powerful campaign.

I am aware that it feels like a very long time.

Why, therefore, such a protracted holdout? To put it more simply, Google has to spend a significant amount of time processing data in order to acquire a sufficient quantity of it so that it can properly deliver your advertisement to the intended target population.

In this post, I’ll explain how that time is spent and how it may eventually benefit both you and your company in a way that’s beneficial to both.

What You Should Anticipate During the Initial Seven Days of Running Google Ads
It usually takes between twenty-four and forty-eight hours for Google to assess and approve your Google Ads account once you have initially activated the account.

Google requires an additional week from the time you gain permission in order to:

Collect important information pertaining to your company.
Acquire knowledge on the subject of your choosing.
Examine your target audience
This procedure might take much more time to finish depending on the size of your company or the sophistication of your target demographic.

How to Determine If Your Advertisements Will Be Successful


During the time that you are being set up or ramping up, one thing that you should keep in mind is that your daily budget will only allow you to receive a small portion of the impressions and clicks that you have targeted. This is due to the fact that Google will not immediately spend your whole daily allocation on advertising.

So, how many impressions do you think you need to see before you can consider yourself successful?

In an ideal scenario, we propose a minimum of 15 hits per day per ad group (not campaign), and we also require a minimum of 200-300 clicks on the keywords every month. If you are not obtaining at least this many clicks every day per ad group, you need to reevaluate both your spending plan and the way your campaign is set up.

What to Anticipate Following the Initial Seven Days of Running Google Ads
After the first week of your account being activated, you may have peace of mind knowing that Google will keep serving advertisements and collecting data for your account. On the other hand, DO NOT anticipate that you will suddenly be inundated with leads.

In all candor, it can take anywhere from two to four weeks for your Google Ads campaign to start picking up steam.

Keep Your Cool and Carry on Advertising


Make an effort to limit the number of adjustments made to your ad account from the second to the fourth week of the advertising campaign. You want Google to keep collecting as much information as it can while avoiding having to restart the process owing to the many changes you make to your account.

However, that’s not the end of it! The following information is extremely essential for you to understand:

When you first start a campaign with Google Ads, you need to check and make sure that your click-through rate (also known as CTR) is not being rated just yet.

What exactly is the CTR, and why is it so vital?

The click-through rate of your ad campaign is the single most important element in assessing how relevant your ad campaign is to the audience you are trying to reach. If Google does not have access to this data, it will be forced to compute other criteria like as

Relevance of keywords to advertisements
Relevance of advertisements to landing pages
Timing required for loading a website
The historical performance of the account
If Google is unable to appropriately score your campaign at this time, it would be risky for them to let you compete equally with other Google Ads advertisers that have established track records, also known as High-Quality Scores. This is beneficial for your company since it means you won’t have to fight head-to-head with other companies who have scored better than you do.

After you have finished going through this learning process, you will be given the opportunity to modify your advertisement so that it has a higher quality score and more successful conversions. After that, you will have a more positive experience when you are forced to compete with Google Ads that have already been developed.

Now that you are familiar with click-through rates (CTRs), we can continue our discussion about the Google Ads learning period.

Having an Understanding of Your Learning Period for Google Ads
Your account status will be changed to “learning” if you create a new campaign for the first time or make major changes to an old campaign you already have.

The condition of “learning” may also be triggered by the following other factors:

Modifications made to the parameters of the bid strategy
Alterations to the processes of conversion (updating an existing action or creating a new one)
The implementation of a new strategic approach to intelligent bidding
There have been major alterations made to the make-up of the campaign.
Large changes in budget or bid


Always remember the 20 percent rule:

A budget modification that accounts for more than 20 percent of your present budget should be avoided.
Pausing and Enabling Campaigns or Ad Groups
Recently, putting a campaign on hold for one day in order to celebrate a holiday and then reactivating it pushed a client’s campaign into a five-day learning mode.
In most cases, a learning period will not be triggered by making adjustments to the keywords, ad groups, or advertisements. On the other hand, if you make significant changes to all of these components all at once, your campaign can need more time for learning.

Don’t Panic If Your CPCs Are Rising While Your Conversions Are Falling!
Expect both your delivery and your efficiency to suffer while you are going through the learning process. On the other side, your cost-per-click (CPC) rates will go up, your cost-per-acquisition rates will go up, and your conversion rates will go down. Yikes!!!

However, there is no need to be concerned since this is only a step in the process. There is no need to worry about this since you will recoup all of this once your PPC manager begins to follow our recommended procedures. The following are some of the reasons why this pattern occurs throughout the process of learning:

Google uses both your Quality Score and your bid to decide whether it will include your ad in the auction for sponsored content. In addition to this, Google has to have an understanding of what it is that generates the outcomes (conversions) that you want it to improve. In a nutshell, the algorithm requires some amount of time to work with the signal in order to comprehend what has been shown to perform effectively and generate outcomes.

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


As soon as the algorithm has collected sufficient information, your status will be changed to “eligible.” You have the ability to make optimization modifications to the Google ad campaign from this point forward, including the following:

Advertising copy
Target keywords
Keywords that are not positive
Target audiences Location
Make sure that you make all of the required adjustments in order to avoid wasting clicks in the future.

Alterations to the Scheduling and Optimization of
You will need to wait until there is sufficient data to assess how a change in optimization affected the campaign each time you make a modification to optimization settings. This procedure may take anywhere from one to two weeks to complete, depending on the magnitude of the changes you want to make. In light of this, it is important to provide solid groundwork right from the start in order to avoid unintentionally elongating the time during which one is learning.

Within Google Ads, it is possible to throw away a significant amount of cash if you do not choose the appropriate partner agency or engage the appropriate expert. In point of fact, it may determine the success or failure of your business!

We have seen inexperienced PPC specialists and even large agencies squander tens of thousands of dollars each month because they chose the incorrect keyword type, did not add a sufficient number of negative keywords, and even ran the campaigns around the clock. These mistakes led to the loss of revenue.

Do not allow the higher charges of professional companies who understand PPC cause you to shy away from working with them. You may trust me when I say that it is well worth it to spend $500 in a competent agency (approximately 1 to 2 percent more than a rival that is poorly qualified) that can assist your company to enhance its conversion rates by developing a successful Google ad campaign. Learn more about how the skilled campaign optimization services offered by SEO Help Me can generate digital marketing results that more than pay for themselves.

Optimizations made to Google Ads, as well as re-optimizations


The process of optimizing and re-optimizing your Google ad, together with the amount of time it takes for Google’s algorithm to respond to each change you make, does add up to a process that takes around three months (7 days multiplied by the number of adjustments made = approximately three months).

This period of time is, of course, subject to change based on the kind of advertising you are running, the demographics of the audience you want to attract, and other factors.

You are, in essence, giving Google permission to become an expert in the field of promoting your company.

When you are attempting to figure out how to maximize all of these elements, having access to a professional PPC business that is also a Google Premier Partner is an excellent resource to have. If a firm is not a Google Premier Partner, you absolutely should not employ them (only 2 percent of PPC agencies are Google Premier Partner).

Since you are now familiar with the inner workings of the algorithm, I will provide you with some pointers on how to manage your Google Ads account for the first three months.

How to Improve Your Performance with Google Ads in the First Three Months
We are aware that three months might seem like an interminable amount of time, particularly after you have put a significant amount of effort and work into producing a Google ad. You are looking for results as fast as possible, and you want to ensure that you are getting your money’s worth! Nevertheless, having patience is very necessary during the whole of the Google Ads creation procedure.

Consider the time period of three months as the maturation phase for the Google ad that you have prepared. This will help you remain motivated throughout the process. Your newly established advertising campaign, just like many other things, will continue to improve with time. To ensure that your advertising campaign is as successful as it possibly can be, the following steps should be taken throughout the course of the first three months.

Month 1: Compiling the Data


The data you collect over the first month of your advertising campaign will be your most trusted ally. This demonstrates the need of beginning with a plan that has a broad scope. If you collect information from a large number of different individuals, you will be better able to determine which segments of the population end up becoming new customers.

Do not be too restrictive with your criteria; instead, just employ phrase matches or modified broad matches. This is the most important piece of advice that we can provide for an expansive approach.

Utilizing location-based targeting is one approach that may be used here. If your company just operates out of one physical location, you should focus your marketing efforts on residents of the metropolitan or broader local region.

Once you have determined the efficacy of this targeting, you will be able to modify it so that it focuses on more particular categories of individuals.

Month 2: Make Any Necessary Adjustments


After you have gathered data from the outcomes of your advertisement during the first month of the campaign, the next stage is to modify different aspects of your advertisement and see how the changes affect the efficacy of the advertisement. Keywords and targeting are two of the most important components that are amenable to modification.

Do you remember how during the first month we implemented a plan with a broad scope? The results of using this method become visible in the second month. As soon as you get an idea of how successful broad location-based targeting is, you will be able to modify it so that it targets more particular groups of individuals.

One further strategy is to begin by describing oneself and one’s activities using a number of different keywords. The approach of trial and error, which was discussed before, may be used to test various aspects of your advertisement, including alternative keywords, phrases, headlines, and other components. It’s also possible to do this with the help of certain of Google Ads’ built-in capabilities.

You will be able to discover which keywords are producing fruitful results and which are producing nothing at all if you compare the efficacy of your keywords throughout the first month of your advertising campaign. The next month, you will have the opportunity to further develop your keyword strategy in order to improve your ability to attract prospective customers.

Month 3: Increase the Size of Your Results


When you have put in a lot of effort and made adjustments to your advertising strategy, the third month is when you will begin to see the effects of the improvements you have made.

When you’ve found the advertising that works best for your business, it’s time to roll it out to a wider audience. If you are pleased with the outcomes of your updated advertising campaign, you may want to think about devoting even more money to it in the future. It is possible that running a campaign on a wider scale is the answer to reaching a greater number of prospective consumers and attaining success over the long term.

You may discover in real-time what your prospective clients are searching for and how they go about finding your company by tweaking and monitoring your Google ad campaign. This will allow you to better cater to their needs.

As the owner of a business, you will find this information to be extremely beneficial; not only will it be useful for future advertising campaigns, but it will also provide you with a comprehensive picture of the market in your immediate area as well as the strategies that will be of use moving forward!

Modify These Components to Achieve the Best Possible Results with Google Ads
When it comes to adjusting and optimizing your Google advertising, having an experienced PPC team on your side comprised of ad experts, copywriters, and data analysts may make all the difference in the world for your campaign.

Why? Because these organizations have been educated to keep an eye out for a range of crucial components while making adjustments to your advertisement, they can do a better job.

Here are some of the tricks under our sleeve that help us obtain the best possible results for our customers using Google Ads:

Regarding the approach of the bid, we do not favor the use of automatic bidding. When we discover that an advertising account has been running clever campaigns, we immediately request a refund.
When selecting efficient keywords, it is essential to focus on the search phrases that the target audience is currently using in their own research. This kind of term is known as “commercial purpose keywords.” This might make it possible for your advertisement to capture the attention of those who are interested in learning more about your company.
Keywords with a negative connotation Recognizing which of your keywords have a bad connotation is just as crucial as identifying which of your keywords have a good connotation. The use of negative keywords may assist in narrowing down potential customers to those who are unlikely to be interested in the products or services you provide. Because this prevents wasted effort and the expenditure of unnecessary advertising dollars, it will help you save money.
Ad copy: It often takes many iterations before an effective ad text is achieved. A PPC expert will often be unsuccessful in this area. Although they may be familiar with the intricacies of Google’s algorithm and other technical aspects, their ad text abilities are just not up to par. However, professional agencies are aware of these components and are able to easily circumvent them in their operations.
Conversions: Almost all of the current ad accounts that have been analyzed or taken over by our company have improper conversion tracking implemented. If you are not reporting the correct conversions to Google, then Google will never learn from the correct data, and it will continue to show advertisements to the incorrect audience. As you can see, this will result in a great deal of trouble in the years to come.
If your Google ad isn’t resulting in conversions, there may be something wrong with the ad itself that may be corrected with a few easy rewrites. An expert advertising firm such as SEO Help Me will be able to identify what aspects of your advertisement need to be modified and will be able to do so effectively.

Final Takeaways


In the first three months, you shouldn’t anticipate any miracles to happen. The path to greatness is paved with patience and practice. Using Google Ads is more of an investment than a get-rich-quick scheme.

However, if after three months of using PPC you are still not seeing any effects, you should seek the assistance of an expert.

You can request a free PPC audit from SEO Help Me, a company that has over 300 successful campaigns under its belt and a Google Premier Partnership. In response to your request, one of our experienced SEO Help Me advertisers will review your account and determine the most effective ways to improve your results.