When first starting new campaigns, it is quite easy to get blindsided by the immediate results rather than letting it run and learning from a larger data set. At AdPilot, we always advise our clients to get started with a minimum term of three months because it can take a little longer than 1 month to get enough data to make actionable changes and recommendations for the future of the campaigns.
Ad spend and the competition can play a big part in the impact of your pay per click marketing, and so can seasonality. We have broken down below how these affect your results on a short term campaign:
Ad Spend Can Limit Your Data
You can have any kind of budget for PPC campaigns, which is what makes them a great marketing channel but a limited budget can affect your statistics. If you have a very limited budget and only run a campaign for one month, they are more than likely going to be restricted to the times your adverts show to customers and will not give you viable stats. If you’re able to run the same campaign, even if it has a limited budget, over a minimum of three months you’re able to get a much better idea on how your audience is interacting with your ads over a longer period. This can inform your future marketing.
Your Competitors Can Impact Your Statistics
The same can be said for thinking about your competitors too. It is good to assume that at least some of your competitors will have an agency or full time person working on the account, which means they are conducting regular changes to improve performance. This means that the performance of your own account can fluctuate week-to-week and therefore, it is good to be able to compare monthly stats against one another to see how you’re stacking up against the companies trying to compete for your customers’ attention.
Seasonality Changes Consumer Behaviour
Fluctuations can also happen during different periods of the year too. So, if you have data on the previous year(s), this will also help you when implementing campaigns but if you don’t have that historical data, the more months you can run the campaigns for the better informed you’ll be of what months perform better than others.
By simply running a campaign for one month, you’ll be basing your future marketing on a very select data range and could in fact negatively impact your business long term. If you were to run your campaigns during April for example, the statistics would be impacted by the Easter holidays and if your campaigns are live during July, for example, the weather could play a factor too.
We would always advise running your PPC campaigns as part of an overall strategy for long term success, but if you do want to run a short term campaign perhaps to influence another marketing channel’s strategy like SEO, then a minimum term of 3 months is really important. If you’d like to discuss more information on how to implement your PPC campaigns, contact one of our experts today.
