Activate and Monitor Your Campaign

Now that your campaign is ready, it’s time to talk payments. Google will direct you back to your main screen and it should show that your ads are enabled, but you’ll definitely want to set up your billing and payments under “Tools and Settings” so you can start bidding.

Ads will usually start running almost immediately but sometimes they go into review for up to a few days 

You’ll want to take full advantage of reporting monitor performance. There are a number of metrics you’ll want to keep an eye on:

Checking Impressions and Clicks:

If you’re not getting any or very few clicks, make sure your campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords are all enabled

Once you’re sure it’s working, still check in every day or every few days. Some things to look out for:

• Lots of impressions on keywords but no clicks: could be the wrong audience, bad ad copy, or too low of a bid (may want to pause until you figure it out)
• Keywords with high CTRs/Conversions: you may want to put these in their own ad group to optimize for best performance

Impression Share Data:

This has mostly replaced Average AdRank. This metric shows you how the performance of your ads compares with others. Here’s a resource on how to view impression share.

Ad performance:

Specifically monitor any split testing based on a previous period (not just one day), best impression to click ratio (each ad should get at least 30 clicks before you decide which one is better in a split test) Note: highest CTR may not be the highest conversion rate

Search term report:

Check once a month at the Campaign or Ad Group level to see what people are searching before they click on your ad. If there are relevant search queries getting good CTR/Conversions, make them exact match keywords, make searches not relevant to your business negative keywords

Conversions and bid prices:

Google will tell you how much a first page bid costs but make sure you compare that with your average position.

 If your average position is already fairly high, it may not be worth increasing your bid. Decrease your bid on keywords that aren’t performing well, and potentially increase bids on high performers.