Now in many walks of life, I can be quite an impatient person. When I’m walking through the supermarket aisles and someone decides to put their trolley slap bang in the middle as they browse the brands of ketchup to buy. Fresh cakes from the oven that I know need 10 minutes or so to cool down before I can eat them. That website that feels like it’s taking an eternity to load. The new must-have gadget I ordered online that takes 3-4 days to arrive but I want it yesterday. All these things test my patience, and I would be the first to admit that my thresholds aren’t too high at the best of times.

Fortunately, this trait of mine doesn’t extend into my day-to-day working profession, which is a good job, as impatience and PPC don’t tend to be the best of friends!

So why is patience such a virtue in PPC?

Without a doubt, the use of PPC as part of the online marketing mix can offer fantastic return on investment due to its measurability on a number of metrics such as click volumes, bounce rates and cost per conversion. But whilst it would be great to produce amazing results on day 1 of any campaign for our clients, this often can be quite unrealistic.

The work that goes into optimising a PPC campaign will, more often than not, initially follow a similar format each time – extensive keyword research, effective grouping of keywords, regular reporting, advert testing and so on. But that’s not to say that the way campaigns respond will follow the same format. Every market is different, and therefore you can expect varying results. The way a website looks and operates within that market can vary the results even further (especially if it isn’t very user friendly!). With that in mind, it can take time to find that winning formula, with no single factor a guarantee of success over any other.

With the need to work on a campaign over time also comes the need patience, which is where the link is made. So where specifically should it be adopted?

Bid adjustments

“It’s 2pm, and XYCorp’s campaign has only had four clicks so far today with no conversions! It had 30 clicks this time yesterday and 4 conversions – I don’t get it!”. We’ve all been there, but panicking and making rash bid adjustments isn’t going to help. It might just be having a bad start to the day, or there may be other factors beyond your control. Either way, it’s too early to make snap judgements. Be patient and assess again tomorrow – if the poor performance continues, then look to take action.

Advert testing

You’ve decided to write a new advert for that Adgroup with the poor clickthrough or conversion rate. How long do you leave it running before making a decision on its effectiveness? Well, this all depends on the levels of traffic that ad group is seeing. With 10 impressions a week, it’s nearly impossible to tell how well an advert is going to perform after a couple of days. Patience is key, certainly at least until you have enough data to make an informed decision.

Performance of keywords

Using the same theory of giving adverts time to prove whether they have the ability to perform or not, the same approach must be adopted for keywords as well. It can be very tempting to drop a keyword and add it in as a negative if its clickthrough rate is low, and thus potentially harming a campaign’s Quality Score, or if it is failing to convert despite high clicks and spend. But a loss of patience and rash decisions do not work well here. A keyword can have a poor clickthrough rate for many reasons such as a poorly written advert, strong competition or low advert position. A keyword can also fail to convert due to a weak landing page or website in general – this doesn’t necessary mean that the keyword is poor. It is therefore vitally important that all avenues are investigated before action is taken, as you could be removing keywords that in different circumstances could perform very well for a campaign.

So there you have it. Patience is most certainly a virtue… well between the hours of 9-5 it is for me. At all other times, I still reserve my right to sigh heavily in frustration when the person at the cash machine in front of me takes 10 minutes to check their balance!

Tags: advert testing, Adwords, bid management, keyword management, PPC