Patience is the Name of the Game in Pay Per Click

SEO, the saying goes, is a marathon – slow, steady, and long-term in outlook. Businesses don’t achieve success from day one, but rather have to invest in growth further down the line.

Compared to SEO, pay per click advertising feels like a sprint. Businesses have the ability to see immediate results, and so they can be forgiven for thinking that taking a fast-paced approach to PPC is all that is needed for success. In fact, without taking the time to analyze past results and subsequently reset your strategy, that approach can be detrimental to your brand’s pay per click campaign.

In pay per click, feedback can be instantaneous. But just like in the world of SEO, analysis takes time. Allow your campaign some room to breathe, and refrain from making constant course corrections so that you can draw the right conclusions. Too many changes all at once – say, for example, simultaneous revisions to the ad copy and to keyword matching – can make teasing out the cause-and-effect that much more difficult.

As a general rule, leave 5-10 business days between sizable changes before making subsequent changes. Of course, where a change has negatively affected your campaign – for example by sending the price per conversion skyrocketing – you need not to leave it alone for that length of time. That is a case where the instantaneousness of the feedback your Adwords dashboard provides you should be taken advantage of.

But with smaller tweaks, treat your campaign like a pilot treats his airplane. If you need to make a large course correction, something must have gone wrong.

For more information on managing your pay per click campaign, contact us today.