Figuring out the right time to roll out a PPC campaign requires a certain level of experience with advertising and a decent knowledge about the online trends. While one can never be sure of the perfect time to launch these campaigns, here are the 10 times when you must NOT launch them out.
- When you haven’t double-checked (and then double-double checked) your settings.
There could be instances where you accidentally launch campaigns with the wrong settings and only realise this once you have already drained your ad budgets but haven’t been able to score a single relevant lead. Pay extra attention to your campaign settings such as the geography, language, maximum budget, etc. and triple check before you finally press that launch button.
- When you don’t have a soft launch plan initially.
Mastering PPC campaigns requires lots of practice and thousands of hours of training. You can not just go all-in in your first few campaigns. Start your campaigns at 10% to 50% of your budget and then closely monitor their performance for a day or two. Keep editing the keywords and other targeting options based on your observations and then slowly progress towards more expensive campaigns. Throttle down on your budgets initially to save your money from getting wasted without results.
- When you don’t have a strategy and want to launch out of urgency.
Jumping into something without a solid strategy to back your decisions is just going to lead you into darkness. Do not just launch your campaigns because your boss read something over the internet and is now over motivated about the power of digital marketing. If you sense something of this nature, question your boss about the strategy behind this decision. This will make him either double down on his instincts or rethink his urgency. Either way, you’ll be saving your organization a lot of money.
- When you’re unable to track conversions from campaigns.
Launching campaigns without tracking conversions from it is equivalent to throwing away your dollars in a deep well not knowing if there is even a bottom to it. PPC campaigns are not just another way of advertising where you dedicate your budgets and monitor the number of total conversions at the end. You need to monitor every single step and run analytics to see where your ad budget is taking you.
- When your selling season is at its peak.
Launching a campaign before a peak season may be helpful but launching one in the middle of it can backfire. Optimizing a PPC campaign for perfection takes time so make sure whenever you launch, there is enough time to fix the campaign by trial and error. Otherwise, if it’s the peak selling season and you find out some issues with your campaign, you’ll either mess up the sales fixing your campaign or waste a lot of money on ads without a lot of conversions.
- When your peak selling season just ended.
As a marketer, you might think that starting out fresh after a peak selling season just ended could be a great idea. In fact, most marketers think of this without considering the practical implications of post-sales trends. This is the time when you’re essentially done selling and no matter what you do, you only go down from here. Launching campaigns at such a time means that all of your key numbers will be lower than your expectations. You will have fewer inquiries, fewer leads, and fewer sales.
- When you’re going out for a weekend.
This can’t be stressed enough that PPC campaigns require close monitoring and fixing while they’re up and you can’t just launch them and leave. If you launch a campaign on a nice Friday evening when you’re leaving for the weekend, you are only going to return to sheer disappointment and zero results. Also, when you come back on Monday, you will already be loaded with so many tasks for the week that you might not be able to monitor the campaign again and face the same results.
- When you’re halfway through a month.
Launching a campaign in the middle of the month is also not very effective since if you do so, your monthly reporting comparisons will be off. You won’t be able to get to the right monthly statistics regarding clicks, impressions, budgets, or conversions. Even if the monthly cycle fixes over the course of some months, the trend lines will still be inaccurate and misleading. Therefore, to avoid all of this, just set an early date for your campaign launch.
- When you’re leaving for a long vacation.
Launching your campaign before leaving for a vacation has exactly the same effects as discussed for the weekend, with some added steroids and multivitamins. Even if you think you’ll be able to monitor the campaigns while away, trust me, the AdWords interface doesn’t load nearly as fast as it would normally would, when you are sitting on the beach. Also, is it even a vacation when you are buried in your computer the whole time? Just try to schedule a launch for when you are going to be physically present at the office.
- When you’re recovering from the failure of another agency,
Never rush into a PPC campaign if your company or one of your clients recently failed to advertise with another agency. If their PPC results didn’t look very good the last time, it is pretty reasonable to think that they will not be very positive this time too. You need to take a step back in this case and work more on your strategy. Do not step into PPC again until you get your mind in the right place and the content on your website right.