I just launched my first Adwords campaign this morning. Since I drink way too much coffee I’ve been staring at the campaign statistics, refreshing the page, and nothing is changing. Is this normal for a campaign’s first day? I’d imagine it is but just wanted to check to see if I should be waiting until tomorrow to see results.
I believe it's periodically updated throughout the day, so you'd be best to probably check every few hours or so. It might also take a little while for the ads to start being served. One thing you could do to see if you're getting impressions would be to try enter one of your keywords into a google search (preferably a keyword that does not have a lot of competition so that you would be one of the few shown on the main result page). No guarantees, but if your ad shows, then you know your campaign is at least running and generating impressions. Then it's just a matter of waiting for the statistics to update.
From what I've seen it can take 15-60 minutes for some activity to start showing up (depending on keywords)