After this initial tuning for the first week or two, it’s important that you then slow down your adjustments. An important thing to keep in mind is that any adjustments you make to the actual advertisements themselves (not the keywords) results in Google immediately slowing ad delivery of these ads while they go through an editorial approval process. This usually takes up to a week, and so you need to allow at least a fortnight to see the results of any changes in ad wording. Because of this, when making changes to advertisements, you may want to ensure that you have at least 3 or 4 different advertisements for each Ad Group, and that you don’t make changes to all of them at once (depending on how important the changes are of course – for instance a change in your website address would require immediate change on all ads of course!).
Keyword changes can be made with more immediate feedback (they are implemented almost immediately).
Therefore I recommend that after the initial week or two of adjustments to your web marketing campaign, that you move to a fortnightly or monthly monitoring of your campaign depending on how significantly you are investing in this advertising medium, and the level of changes you are making. By all means login each day to view your results or receive a daily email report (Google offer these reports as a standard feature) but in general adjustments should be given time to take effect before drawing any far reaching conclusions from these.
It may sound silly, but depending on how sophisticated your Adwords web marketing campaign objectives are, you may want to consider keeping a diary. At Salsa, for our own Salsa Internet adwords advertising programme, we only run 4 or 5 campaigns, with most of these only having a handful of Ad Group’s and yet over time I’ve found myself forgetting exactly what changes I’ve made to which groups and how the advertisement wording has changed over time.
This can be frustrating when you find yourself with a feeling of de ja vu in making changes to your campaign. A short diary entry about the general nature of changes you made over time can be a very useful thing, particularly if you have a large number of Ad Groups or Campaigns that you are managing.
Try to avoid strong reactions or drastic campaign changes based on observations over the short term. Results measured over a longer period of time (at least a month) are always more reliable than reacting strongly to a few days of data.
