Ongoing Optimization

Campaigns drift

A campaign that was well built on day one is not automatically well built on day ten. Competitors change their bidding, demand moves with the week and the weather, and the searches triggering your ads slowly widen into territory you never chose.

None of that announces itself. It shows up as a budget producing less than it did, which is why longer campaigns get a review part-way through rather than being left to run.

What a mid-campaign review involves

Most of it is unglamorous and most of the value is in one item:

• Reading the search terms report — the real queries that triggered your ads, which are always partly different from the keywords chosen.
• Adding negative keywords so the wasteful ones stop costing you. This is usually the most valuable part of the review.
• Shifting budget toward the services, areas and hours that are producing work.
• Where more than one ad is running, retiring the weaker wording and writing a new variation against the winner.
• Watching pacing, so the budget does not empty by mid-morning and leave you invisible when people actually call.

Short campaigns are built to run as set

Starter runs for a week, and Your Budget until its ad budget is spent. That is too short for mid-run changes to prove anything, so the work goes into the setup — the right searches, negative keywords from day one, a sensible radius — and the report at the end says what we would adjust next time.

Seasonality is real, and plannable

Heating searches spike with the first cold week, air conditioning with the first hot one, roofing after storms. The businesses that do best are visible just before a spike rather than a week into it, when everyone has already called someone.

If your trade has a season, we would rather time your campaign to start just before it than react once it has arrived.

Knowing when to leave it alone

Changing things constantly is its own failure. Every significant change resets what Google has learned, and judging a few days of lumpy local demand as though it were a trend leads to undoing work that was fine.

So: small adjustments when they are needed, structural changes rarely and deliberately.

When we would tell you to stop

If the searches simply are not there, or the cost of a customer is higher than a customer is worth to you, the honest answer is that advertising is not your problem to solve right now.

We would rather say that and keep the relationship than sell you another campaign that cannot work.