Is it normal for a campaign to take 3 months to evaluate? My campaign doesn't seem to get a lot of traffic even when i max out keyword bids at $5. They keywords are broad, phrase and exact and I'm using 2 - 4 word keywords. No crazy longtails. It may take 3 months to evaluate and even then it may only be grossing 1k a month. Do you guys have campaigns that take a few months to become profitable? -Jay
It can take quite a bit of time to figure out which ad copy as well as which keywords work for you. If you have analytics on your page you can at least find out what the traffic that is arriving on your site is doing when they get there. Many of many campaigns have taken 6 months or more before they are sufficiently optimized. Good luck -Patz
Jay, What do you mean by traffic here - are your keywords getting a lot of impressions, but not many clicks? Or do you mean you're not getting impressions?
I mean my CTRs are pretty good (about 4% per adgroup). I'm just not getting many impressions on the keywords. Raising bids helps a bit (i tried raising to $5 on some keywords), but i'm still not getting TONS of impressions. my campaign is set to accelerated my keywords are mostly GREAT -Jay
You may need to expand the keywords you are going after or you may be in a niche that just doesn't get the search traffic. Beware of getting too specific with your keywords.
Try adding more keywords, both general and long tail. Keep the bids low at first, but add synonyms and related terms. Make a new campaign with more general ad copy if you need to. If you're not already using Google's Keyword tool, try it today. It's not perfect, but you may be surprised at some terms it comes up with that you might not have thought of. Oh, and it might sound counter-productive to add the long tails, but any impressions you get from them are going to be pretty well targeted. Best of luck.
I agree with adding more keywords. Then again, if it's profitable with very low search volume, keep it, rinse and repeat.
Make sure your landing page has some of your keywords sprinkled in it. That may be why google wants you to have 5$ bids. If you are not getting many impressions, but have a decent click through rate, you may just be in a very small targeted niche that only gets a few searches a day, but are much higher quality visitors who are actually looking for your product, rather than tons of impressions, clicks and visitors who aren't looking for what you are selling. I would suggest adding just a few more keywords to your adgroup as well. you never know how they are going to impress/convert the visitors typing in those keywords until you give it a shot. Hope that helps