Gathering the data

Once you have your campaign set up, your advertisement made and your keywords plugged in it's worth giving Google Adwords 24 hours so that things settle down. This is 24 hours after your advertisement has been approved.

Keep calm here. Imagine what we are going to do from this moment on as the work of a master craftsman slowly working a chunk of wood into a fine piece of furniture. He will start with a saw to get the rough shape of things (we've done that) and then spend a great deal of time sanding, scraping and polishing to get the perfect end result.

But before we look too deeply we need to understand what we are looking for in the data so we can understand what it is we need to sand, scrape or polish!

Why isn't my Adwords performing?

Perhaps a little sarcastic but unless you are paying $0.01 per click and visitors are pouring into your site where they buy your product or service, click on an advertisement, subscribe to your newsletter or such like then you are going to feel like Adwords is not performing!

So what we will be looking for is the root cause but we have to be careful not to take any one piece of data at face value as it could make you take a turn for the worse.

At all times keep in mind that your campaign may not be performing because:

• The keywords are wrong, people searching those keywords aren't actually your target customer (even if you are sure they are, they just aren't – remember the bit about Trophy Terms?).
• The landing page (where they arrive on your website after clicking your advertisement) is not converting the visitors.
• Your advertisements are not worded correctly and they:
  
  Don't inspire internet users to click through. Don't inspire Google to display them.

What else is in the chapter 'Gathering the data'?