New PPC campaigns are like new puppies. Expensive, messy, and prone to eating money. The first 30 days decide whether you've got a good dog or a chewing disaster.
Most advertisers set a campaign up, let it run, and hope. That's not optimisation. That's wishful thinking with invoices attached.
Here's what to actually do in the first month to turn a floundering campaign into a proper performer.
Week One: Don't Panic
New campaigns have a learning phase. Your numbers will look rough. Cost per click will be high, conversions low, and your CFO's eyebrow will be raised. Hold your nerve. Touching it too much kills the algorithm's ability to learn.
Week Two: Look at Search Terms
Not keywords. Search terms - the actual queries people typed. Half of them will be irrelevant. Add those as negatives. This is the single highest-value hour you'll spend on any PPC account.
- Irrelevant industries: Negative them.
- Job seekers: "Careers", "jobs", "salary" - negative.
- Freebie hunters: "Free", "cheap", "diy" - usually negative.
- Competitor names: Depends on your strategy, but usually yes.
Week Three: Ad Copy Testing
Three ads per ad group, minimum. One bold, one benefit-led, one urgency-led. Let Google decide the winner. Pause the losers. Replace with variations. Keep going.
Landing Pages: Where Campaigns Live or Die
You can have brilliant ads and still lose, if your landing page is rubbish. Match the ad's promise. One clear goal. No menu to distract. Fast load. Trust signals. We've helped clients double conversion rates without changing the ads at all, just the page. Our web design team does this work weekly.
Burning Budget on Ads That Aren't Working?
We'll audit your PPC account for free. Honest verdict, even if it's "pause everything".
Free PPC AuditConversion Tracking: Get It Right
If you're not tracking conversions properly, you're gambling. Enhanced conversions, offline conversion imports, server-side where possible. GA4 and Google Ads talking to each other. This isn't sexy, but without it nothing else matters.
Quality Score: The Invisible Multiplier
Better Quality Score means cheaper clicks. Better relevance, better landing pages, better CTR - all push it up. We've written about this more deeply elsewhere, worth a nose on the PPC services page.
Bidding Strategies: Start Manual
Everyone wants Max Conversions from day one. Don't. You haven't got the data yet. Manual CPC or Max Clicks for the first couple of weeks gets you cleaner learning. Then move to smart bidding once you've got 30+ conversions under your belt.
The Budget Question
Small budgets spread thin achieve nothing. One campaign, one ad group, £30 a day is better than four campaigns at £7 a day. Concentrate. Win something. Then scale.
Reporting That Matters
Don't look at impressions. Look at cost per acquisition, conversion rate, and return on ad spend. Everything else is decoration. If your agency is sending you reports full of impressions, get a new agency. (We're available.)
Closing
PPC isn't alchemy. It's a weekly discipline of watching, tweaking, and being honest about what's working. Give it 60 days of proper attention and you'll have something worth scaling. Give it two weeks of poking and you'll have a mess.
