What To Be Checking After The First Month Of Running Google Ads

When it comes to managing a Google Ads account, creating your account and setting up campaigns is just the beginning of your journey.

A lot of time and effort goes into managing a successful account – but don’t let the road ahead overwhelm you! With regular monitoring and optimisation, you’ll start seeing healthy growth in the direction you want to head, whether that be increased clicks, conversions, impressions, etc…

In the first month after setting your campaigns live, you may feel a little overwhelmed with where to start optimising. The good news is that in these early stages of your account, it’s a prime time to observe and learn. This is your research and development phase where you’re looking at the data for the first time, noticing trends and considering what to do next. You don’t necessarily need to be making any big changes to your account at this stage – but there’s a number of things you should be checking.

So read on – we’ll walk you through what you should be looking for in your Google Ads account after the first month of it being live.

You can add negatives at the ad group level, the campaign level, or even to the entire account. A quick way to add negatives across the entire account is to set up a negative keyword list that’s applied to all your campaigns.

To do this:

• Click on tools & settings > shared library > negative keyword lists.
• Click on the blue plus button to add a new list, and call it something along the lines of ‘Negative keyword list – all campaigns’.
• You’ll then be prompted to add campaigns to this list – add all of your campaigns.

Now you’ll be able to add keywords to this list moving forward and build out negative keywords that are applied across your account.

It goes without saying that checking your ads is crucial to maintaining a solid account performance. If your ads are working well, your account will thrive.

In the first weeks of running an account, Google will be checking that your ads don’t violate any policies – and there are a lot of them. If you’re noticing that your clicks are very low, we’d recommend taking a look at your ads at the account level. To do this:

1. Click on ‘all campaigns’ in the left toolbar
2. Select ‘ads and extensions’.
3. Create a filter.
4. Click the filter icon, and choose status > disapproved.

Roll over these and you’ll see why your ads are disapproved. If you don’t believe your ads are in violation, you can submit a review request with Google by clicking on the help icon in the top toolbar.

For ads that are approved and working well, ensure that you have at least two ads for each ad group to test against one another. If you have two ads, take a look at their CTR and see which is performing better. At this point, it’s best to leave the ad copy as is (you’re still in your research and development phase), but consider the differences between the higher-performing ad and the lower-performing one. Is there a stronger call to action in one? Does it pair up better with a high-performing keyword in the adgroup? If the data is still showing a clear winner after a couple more weeks, you should start testing new headlines and descriptions. When you’re testing new ad copy, simply pause the low performer, duplicate the high performer and tweak the copy slightly. Be sure to label the new ad so you can spot it quickly in the future.

Regardless of what you are advertising – all accounts should have conversion tracking set up. If you don’t have conversions set up here’s a support article from Google to help you get setup. If you have conversions set up, you’ll want to be checking in to ensure that conversions are being recorded.

If after 30 days you haven’t seen any conversions appear in your account, you should check what messages are appearing for your conversions via ‘tools & settings > measurement > conversions’. On this screen, you’ll see the status of your conversions in the ‘tracking status’ column.

There are five different types of status’ you may see, and Google’s support documentation explains in detail what each means, and what you should do.

If your conversion tags are set up correctly, but haven’t recorded any conversions in the last 30 days, you may need to rethink how your customers may be engaging with your business. Not everyone converts on the first visit – sometimes it takes multiple visits over a larger period of time. Consider extending your conversion window out to capture a bigger time period by clicking on a conversion name, and editing the conversion window. Google’s largest default window is 90 days, but you can select custom if you’d like to extend it out further.